From left to right: Piero Ercol (Executive Director of Decarbonization at Snam), Antonio Catalano (Chief of Tenova Downstream Business Unit), Michele Della Briotta (Tenaris President in Europe) and Andrea Cignoli (CEO of the Milan office at Techint Engineering & Construction). Tenaris
Today marks the launch of the first trial conducted in Italy using hydrogen at a steel plant to process steel products. The collaboration between Tenaris, Snam -one of Europe's main energy infrastructure operators-, and Tenova -a leading developer and supplier of sustainable solutions for the green transition of the metallurgical industry-, will be carried out for six months, with the aim of evaluating the performance and reliability of using hydrogen in the steel industry and, more generally, in hard-to-abate sectors that are the most challenging to decarbonize.
The goal is to use hydrogen produced on site to fuel a burner recently developed by Tenova (100% H2 ready) and installed in a reheating furnace to hot roll seamless pipes at Dalmine, Tenaris’s mill in Bergamo, Italy. The trial will also help to define and implement safety guidelines and plant management procedures, thus initiating the development of integrated solutions that can substantially lower the CO2 emissions of hard-to-abate industry manufacturing processes.
In addition to serving as the trial site for the project, Tenaris will also lend its know-how for the installation, operation and performance monitoring of the steel plant. Using its expertise in hydrogen-related technologies and molecule transport, Snam will make an alkaline electrolysis system available to Dalmine, which will produce the hydrogen needed for the test.
According to Michele Della Briotta, Tenaris’s president in Europe, “with this project, we are verifying the feasibility and creating the expertise to use hydrogen as a green fuel in our industrial processes; it contributes to Tenaris’s global targets to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% by 2030”.
Tenova will complete the value chain of the process by pooling its know-how on combustion systems and supplying burners specifically made to be fuelled with hydrogen. The project also included a significant contribution from Techint Engineering & Construction, a Techint Group company, with the development of general and detailed installation engineering, the development of risk analysis and the verification of compliance with legal requirements and safety standards.
With this first collaboration with Tenaris, Snam is supporting a major industry player in the use of hydrogen as a service modality, an ad hoc service to enable the use of decarbonized hydrogen in industrial plants or other application environments, in which Snam leases the electrolysis system to the end user. The programme is part of Snam’s broader efforts as a system operator to guide the needs of industrial companies on their path to decarbonize processes that need to be tested in view of future, large-scale infrastructure solutions.
In turn, the companies of the Techint Group (Tenaris, Tenova and Techint Engineering & Construction) will be able to contribute by developing, implementing and validating technologies required to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries by gradually replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen.
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