Modelling bio-CCS deployment across iron and steel plants in Europe

Iron and steel production is highly reliant on coal, which makes integrated steel plants one of the largest single point CO2 emitters. Technologies that would significantly reduce their coal consumption are currently still at pilot scale. Hence opportunities for bioenergy and CCS as emission reduction strategies are evaluated, as they could be directly integrated within the existing iron and steelmaking setup. At the same time, their co-application – referred to as bio-CCS – can further enhance the emission reduction potential of each one of them. This can result in low-carbon steelmaking emitting over 80% less emissions in comparison to today, which would satisfy the EU targets set for 2050.

This work gives an overview of modelling bio-CCS systems, specifically incorporated within the techno-economic BeWhere model, focusing on the deployment of bio-CCS across the integrated steel plants in Europe. The obtained results give an estimate of the average CO2 avoidance cost of 86 € tCO2 -1 , but high variation is present across the individually plants, ranging between 62 and 114 € tCO2 -1. Overall, bio-CCS provides an opportunity to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions occurring on-site (when assuming carbon neutrality of biomass). Modelling possibilities for bio-CCS integration is complex, due to a sophisticated and unique setup of energy usage across each integrated plant together with multiple social-technical factors that may limit their CO2 transport and storage. Introduction of numerous assumptions is hence necessary to overcome those barriers, particularly related to issues on data availability.