Seminar on biochar in the iron and steel industry

On December 5, a seminar was held with a focus on biochar within the project FINAST (Forskning och Innovation i Norrbotten för Avancerad grön Stålframställning och Tillverkning) WP2. The seminar offered presentations from SSAB as well as from three PhD students that are doing research in different parts of the biochar value chain in steel production. The day also offered an exchange with two other research projects, BioChargeEAF and MICO, that organized workshops. The seminar attracted both national and internation participants from industry, institutes and academia.

After a brief introduction to the FINAST project, SSAB shared its thoughts and experiences regarding the complexity of large-scale biochar production in an energy system. Afterwards, the various research tasks within FINAST that link to this questions presented their activities, results and future research questions. Issues highlighted within the project are cost-effective production and supply, optimization of the production process for steelmaking and how the biochar interacts with slag in the steelmaking process in the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF).

The presentations led to interesting conversations between the participants. The day ended with a tour of Swerim's research facility with a particular focus on the agglomeration lab, where a large part of the research is about biochar and how it can be introduced into metal production processes.

The seminar in combination with the two workshops clearly showed that there is strong research and development for scaling up biochar in Sweden and Norrbotten, where industry, institutes, academia collaborate from different perspectives towards a common goal of a fossil-free industry.