Oman green hydrogen project eyes offtake deal with 2.5 mtpa green iron plant

Singaporean start-up Meranti Green Steel said it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Anmah Energy to explore offtake from the consortium’s major electrolysis facility.

Meranti plans to build a facility which will use natural gas and green hydrogen-fuelled direct reduced iron (DRI) to produce 2.5 mtpa hot briquetted iron (HBI) in Oman’s Duqm special economic zone.

Anmah – made up of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), Blue Power Partners, and Al Khadra – was awarded a 320km2 block of land in Duqm to develop a 200,000-tonne green hydrogen plant under Oman’s first public auction.

The duo said linking the green hydrogen and HBI facilities would help address sequencing challenges in both hydrogen production and industrial demand.

“By progressing both sides of the value chain, we aim to create the scale and certainty required to advance our phased decarbonisation strategy and support Oman’s growing green hydrogen ecosystem,” said Meranti Vice-President Projects and Sustainability Andrew Fang.

The HBI plant will initially operate primarily on natural gas and will gradually increase its green hydrogen consumption in line with rising carbon prices.

Meranti expects the project to partially supply its own planned electric arc furnace plant in Thailand, with a focus on exports to European markets.

CIP Energy Transition Fund Director Emily Sykes said the potential supply agreement could create significant economic opportunities and show how Oman could lead sustainable industry.”

Will DRI be key to producing sustainable steel?

Steel production accounts for 8% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions1, making it one of the most polluting industries. With around 1.4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per tonne of steel produced2, against a backdrop of increasing environmental concerns, the need to clean up the process that produces a vitally important material only continues to grow.

Steel, in the most basic sense, is made by mixing carbon and iron at temperatures above 1,400˚C. Primary steelmaking uses a product dubbed Pig Iron – smelted iron from ore, which contains more carbon than needed for steel.

Steelmakers can use a system that bubbles oxygen through molten pig iron, creating equal oxidisation throughout the metal, in doing so, removing excess carbon, while also vaporising or binding impurities made up of elements such as silicon, phosphorus and manganese.

The systems, known as blast furnace-basic oxygen furnaces (BF-BOF), are one of the leading contributors to CO2 emissions from steelmaking. The direct emissions from integrated BOF plants typically amount to 1.8-3.0 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel when coal-fired, and 0.7-1.2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel if gas-fired3.

However, a system first industrialised in the 1960s that uses fuels to react with oxygen in iron oxide pellets to produce highly metallised reduced iron for steelmaking, looks set to benefit from green hydrogen, leaving just steam as the residual, and potentially reducing CO2 emissions by over 95% – the direct reduction of iron – DRI…

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