What it's about

WP5 is dedicated to conducting a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), cost analysis, and safety assessment to support the market deployment and industrial-scale adoption of H2 combustion in the steel industry. This work package will provide critical techno-economic studies that inform investment decisions and assess the feasibility of scaling up hydrogen combustion technology at five steel industry sites. 

The techno-economic analysis will compare hydrogen (oxy-)combustion with the baseline of conventional gas furnaces, demonstrating the economic viability of the new technology. This will help promote investment and facilitate wider adoption. For UGIT and ASCO, the analysis will also consider potential off-takers beyond their own factories, exploring economies of scale and opportunities to share costs across multiple end-users. Additionally, DEW will assess whether it could become an H2 off-taker in the H2ercules project, which plans to supply hydrogen to several industrial regions in Germany where DEW operates. Primary data, including CAPEX and OPEX figures, will be provided by steel companies (UGIT, ASCO, DEW) and model developers (MESS, TUG, HAL), who will carry out cost analyses based on field data or simulations. GENVIA will contribute techno-economic data on its electrolyser technology, based on its future commercial product, the H-Pod. 

On the safety front, safety managers will be appointed to prepare a safety assessment report, which will be submitted to the European Hydrogen Safety Panel (EHSP). UGIT and DEW will conduct ATEX studies for the demonstrators. In addition, a specialized service provider will produce safety reports for the demonstrators and recommend necessary adaptations to the European regulation and normative frameworks (ISO, CEN) to facilitate the replication of this technology across Europe. 

The safety assessment will follow a rigorous two-phase methodology: 

1. Risk Identification: This phase will involve describing the systems used in the demonstrators, identifying potential hazards, and analyzing lessons learned from past accidents in similar contexts. It will also involve determining potential accidents that may occur during the demonstrations and establishing ways to manage these risks. 
2. Risk Estimation and Evaluation: This phase will assess the criticality of each identified accidental scenario based on its likelihood and the severity of its consequences. The performance of safety barriers will be evaluated, and the criticality will be reassessed by incorporating additional safety barriers until the risk is reduced to an acceptable level. 

The safety evaluation will also consider the severity of hydrogen leakage incidents, using standard gas dispersion models to assess the consequences of possible inflammations.