By P Gosselin
Major German steel plant threatened with closure due to green energies transition…
German site pleiteticker.de here reports on one of the latest victim’s of the green energy’s debacle in Germany as the fourth-largest steel producer is now seriously threatened with closure.
Much of Germany’s industrial bas been hard hit by the skyrocketing energy prices that have resulted from the country’s move to green energies, like sun and wind, and away from nuclear power and fossil fuels.
“3100 jobs are now in acute danger, reports opleiteticker.de. “The planned conversion to climate-neutral steel production at Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) in Duisburg is in danger of failing due to financing, according to IG Metall. IG Metall is Germany’s powerful industrial and engineering trade union, representing more than 2 million workers nationwide.
“That would be the end of Germany’s second-largest steel mill,” the IG Metall reported Thursday in Frankfurt am Main.
Pleiteticker calls the recent development “a brewing tragedy”.
HKM aims to replace its two blast furnaces in the years 2025 to 2045 so that they will gradually use more and more climate-neutral hydrogen. However, the cost-effectiveness is proving questionable.
“But this project is now bringing the historic plant to the brink of extinction,” writes pleiteticker.de. “The site has a shortfall of a good two billion euros,” and it “will no longer be competitive after 2030, according to IG Metall and the Works Council.”
If the plant were to be shuttered, production would likely be moved offshore to a location where energy is cheaper and environmental regulations lax. It would also mean another major blow to Germany as a place for industry. Thanks to the climate madness.
If the unions were to come on side with business re energy, surely the government would have to openly change policy. They teamed up earlier this year on Russian gas, the sooner they team up again the better (assuming they are actually seeing sense).
You are stuck in the past Mike. The business and the unions are 100% on the side of the government, so it is impossible to change policy. if you start talking about the people/workers then that would be different, but do not forget the workers’ interests are not represented by either of the three.
The sad thing is Steel is a basic building block for anything
trying to make a renewable steel mill is a basic disaster
No Steel No Renewables No Society
You are absolutely right John.
Steel is essential to every modern country .
Stupid actions will end up costing every one in Germany and also all their customers in other countries .
Politicians and climate activists all need a lesson in basic economics .
The more I see these reports the more I am convinced that a great many people in charge want to shut down the worlds economic activity and install communism to rule the world .
Unelected bureaucrats with flash titles telling us what we can and cannot do .
They are using the threat of climate change to convince the people that they can save them if they do what they tell them.
When will people wake up that we are being led down a dead end street .
But the Germans don’t need to worry, China will sell them all the steel they want, made from iron ore from Australia and cooked with Australian coal.
I’d say “off a cliff,” but yes.
I’d shorten that – No Steel No Society
Society DOESN’T NEED “renewables.”
so true
but i had to have a dig at renewables
Beyond steel, we must also get rid of plastic because it comes from oil.
And, we must get rid of glass because it is made using natural gas. And, silicon for semiconductor chips is made starting with coal and sand, so we have to get rid of chips. Sand is OK.
And, we can’t have any products that require lubricants, because you guessed it, lubricants are made from oil.
It’s not looking good for the whales. They were nearly wiped out when there was less than 2B humans on the planet. How much oil can they sustainably produce?
irony.
would need steel to build the stuff to meet climate demands.
I’m guessing Germans also like their Democracy good and hard.
Say, didn’t they elect someone about 91 years ago that gave it to them good and hard too?
Ben Dover
Peter Zeihan gives us this nugget:
link
Zeihan has it that Germany is up the creek without a paddle. He’s not optimistic about Europe in general. The good news is that he is optimistic about North America.
The saving grace for the USofA is suburbia. As societies urbanize, birth rates drop. People in suburbia keep having kids. That means the USofA is not facing population collapse as they are in Europe and China.
Anyway, what will happen in Germany? The last crap show is still, albeit barely, living memory. For that reason, I don’t think there will be a repetition.
One way or the other, I think the trouble will come from the Russian direction after it gets kicked out of the Ukraine and possibly collapses.
Russia won’t lose, the question is how soon will there be no Ukrainians left to fight them.
it was less of a direct election by the people than you claim. the opposition parties surrendered democracy and granted the bad man the extra powers. so it was the MPs and a dying president who let it happen. only after super powers were granted and he had initial success he got the popular vote.
Haven’t been able to locate any testing data. Does anyone know how Green Steel compares to traditional Coal (carbon) Steel WRT strength and hardness vs Production Cost
Direct reduction using hydrogen and then alloying in an electric arc furnace are now known routes, Some carbon comes from the electrodes used in the EAF and some has to be added to get the required carbon level but I expect there would be no limits on the alloys produced and steel properties would match steel alloys of same composition and heat treatment. Just that it ends up being expensive compared with a blast furnace.
It could have a niche for speciality alloys that are not conducive to the benefits of scale.
Like all manufacturing, it is now impossible to better Chinese/Taiwanese volume producers.
Is this from ore or recycled steel? The article I cited said hydrogen was far from perfected when starting from ore.
Recycled steel
And the ultimate source of the hydrogen? Once again, fossil fuels.
Using wind and solar to “generate” the hydrogen is simply using fossil fuels to generate hydrogen, less efficiently.
“Green energy” is a massive circle jerk.
Which is why the EU has just agreed a border carbon tax on steel and cement.
Don’t know the answer to your question but do know that the hydrogen reduction process used by Hybrit in Sweden is 30% more expensive than conventional steel making. That may change of course as it ramps up production.
However, its total output will be only 1.3m tonnes pa. In the last few years total world production of steel has been around 1.8 billion tonnes pa.
Moot question.
THERE IS NO “GREEN STEEL.” Whatever contortion they’re going through to call steel “green” by injecting worse-than-useless wind and solar into the manufacturing chain is patently false, since wind and solar equipment is 100% dependent on fossil fuels for its existence.
For the avoidance of doubt, there in no “green hydrogen” either, for the same reasons.
“HKM aims to replace its two blast furnaces in the years 2025 to 2045 so that they will gradually use more and more climate-neutral hydrogen.”
________________________________________________
Didn’t WattsUpWithThat just post a Francis Menton opus that pointed out that hydrogen is either not green i.e., “steam reformation” emits CO2, or electrolysis is way too inefficient and expensive?
Shhh… This is a Climate Emergency! Don’t bring FACTS into it!!! </s>
“Climate Neutral?!” LMAO.
They have yet to demonstrate anywhere in the Earth’s climate record that atmospheric CO2 does anything to the Earth’s climate (ditto for methane or any other “greenhouse gas” for that matter), so our existing, conventional fossil fuel based energy infrastructure IS ALREADY “climate neutral,” Unless they have EVIDENCE to the contrary.
HINT: Pet hypotheses, “models,” assumptions, and “scientists say so” ARE NOT “evidence.”
Here’s what CO2 does – Photosynthesis: Plants/Plankton turning Sunlight/CO2/H2O into Food/O2; neither animal nor blade of grass would exist, absent CO2. More CO2 helps plants resist drought/damage/disease, extends growing seasons, lets plants move higher in altitude & Latitudes, shrinks deserts & reduces the spread of fire, plants using & retaining H2O more efficiently. As CO2 rises, photosynthesis flourishes & plants take in more CO2, sparking more growth, photosynthesis & CO2 uptake. Rising temperatures also extend growing seasons, help babies survive, increase net rainfall & save lives. We are in the short period (glacial interstitial) between long Ice Ages, the norm (where I sit) being a half mile of ice. Warm is good, cold is bad.
This Cradle of Life is greener, more fertile & life sustaining than it was 200 years ago. Because adding food to the base of the food-chain supports all of Nature & helps all of Life.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/88331/#88344
You can see from the graph that 30 years ago, Germany relied on coal (soft and hard) and nuclear to generate the VAST majority of its power/electricity.
Those sources (coal/nuclear) are at the top for the most reliable of all. ….. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
At the same time, in the early 1990’s, they were only using a minuscule amount of renewables to generate energy and not much natural gas, much of which is delivered by pipeline from Russia in 2022.
This was their self inflicted bad decision:
They cut their use of extremely reliable sources(coal/nuclear) down by 50% and replaced the void with extremely unreliable sources of massive renewables (wind/solar) which was increased by 10X compared to 30 years ago and natural gas by 2X from Russia.
They did it entirely because burning coal emits CO2. They did it to meet commitments in the fake climate crisis accord. This was a self inflicted decision based entirely on the politics of the fake climate crisis.
Now, they have to back track because of the laws of energy and physics in the real world. Those laws are indisputable and make it impossible to ever replace fossil fuels with just wind and solar.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
September, 2018, at the UN General Assembly, President Trump warns Germany about depending too much on one energy source, especially noting the change to natural gas from Russia. German representatives laugh. Enough said.
Germany has the 6th largest coal reserves in the world but decided to use unreliables instead, feared a possible tsunami could destroy its nukes so shut them down, and ended up dependent on Russian oil. What a way to run a country. No one else could be that stupid surely?…….Oh!
The impossibility has been slow to dawn.
It is impossible to build weather energy extractors using the energy extracted from the weather.
The net zero strategy leads to net negative energy. The economic base has to be eroded in the process.
Germany, now a rapidly escalating train wreck.
Rolling “demand management” or even blackouts may be the actual collision between zealotry and reality that ends the madness.
That is what happens when you hand over energy policy to the zealots in the UN who have the sole objective of feathering their own nest. Eyeing their share of climate ambition imposed on compliant governments in developed countries and cheer leading from the banks and big business.
this moment, in the uk, our vast and vauted wind farms are producing 2% of our electricity.
59% of it is being produced by gas and 14% by nukes.
this shows that sine a huge amount of wind installed is providing 2% when demand is highest, then we can never conceivable install enough wind to even produce enough to replace nuclear – we would need an installed nameplate of 7 times what we have today.
madness.
note; we have a very large roportion of offshore wind now, which supposedly is more reliable – ballox.
The net zero UK Gummint has a cunning Plan B in case the punters start freezing in the dark-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/topstories/coal-plants-put-on-standby-to-supply-electricity/ar-AA15awLD
Welcome to flexible transitioning.
Germany has a tradition of ruining itself by following fanatical courses – the 30 year war about religion, the third Reich’s evil megalomia and now green lunacy. Amazing stupidity from supposedly intelligent people.
They are intelligent and industrious people. Or at least they used to be. The first two times I went to Germany it was TDY. Being into war history I visited Dachau the first time. I went again the 2nd time.
What I was experiencing and seeing among the people of Bavaria did not comport with what they had a hand in doing under Hitler which they had strongly supported.
After turning it over and over in my mind. I came to the conclusion that good people can be made to served evil, and those that see the evil can be persuaded to turn a blind eye to it.
IOW, what happened in Germany under Hitler could happen here, or there, or about anywhere.
When I PCSed to Germany I was at Flint Kassern in Bad Tolz about 30 miles south of Munich. Working in the mess hall there was an old German that had been in the Afrika Korps and been wounded. During the war Bad Tolz was a hospital center with eight hospitals. Many of the service needs were provided by slave labor that came from a satellite camp administered out of Dachau. The German had been invalided and stayed at Tolz working for the hospitals.
Patton himself, when he had his temporary occupation HQ at the Kassern had hired the man to work in that mess hall and he did not retire until a year after I had arrived. We got along great. He was always joking with us and we with him.
In the NCO club, bar tending, was another old German. He was a life long resident of Bad Tolz. When he was a kid he had both of his legs broken by SS officer trainees that were being trained at the very facility we were then in. He had failed to give the Nazi salute when the trainees were marching through the town. The Junkers Schulle there was for training men who were not ethnic Germans to become SS Officers.
I Loved Bavaria and the people!
Germans as a group are a hard working and intelligent people. But the average German will go along with anything stupid as long as he can be convinced the elites approve AND everyone else is doing it.
You’d have thought they’d have done some soul searching on this cultural flaw. Maybe after the next societal catastrophe.
As a patriotic Brit seeing the Germans wreck their economy in such a peaceful self inflicted manner brings a tear to the eye! By the time some pipsqueak gets round to blaming a religious minority for the damage the Mo Enthusiasts will be in the majority so slim pickings there.
Those responsible for this madness will eventually face the consequences, but not before many lives are ruined.
Yes many lives will be ruined -By design?
Those responsible will not face the consequences. Honours and gongs for all of them in the UK
Here is the issue.
If you are about to build a new multi storey structure and are at the placing order for steel girders stage, you will look at the supply options. The option offered from Germany steel stock is $xmillions for framing costs. The options from the far eastern steel stock is half $xmillions.
The reason the far east supply is half the cost s they use low cost energy, mostly coal.
Where will you place your order for steel? Germany or China?
Pump Hydrogen into a furnace, any furnace, and you really will get a ‘blast’
Maybe just not the one you were quite expecting.
It may be useful to remember that reducing Iron ore with hydrogen will leave very impure iron with loads of other things in it. This is why blast furnaces have large quantities of limestone added, which makes a slag which contains all the contaminants. The slag floats on top of the iron, in a very convenient manner. The hydrogen furnace will still have to operate at a high temperature to get a reasonable rate of reaction with the iron ore, and hydrogen at say 1500C needs only a very small amount of oxygen to go bang, which is of course likely to be released from the ore. The idea of hundreds of tons of iron at melting temperature surrounded by hydrogen in similar quantity at a similar temperature, is a disaster waiting to happen, or perhaps they intend to do this at test tube scale? I could become a NIMBY very quickly! Modern blast furnaces produce hundreds of tons of Iron a day, this is not any kind of replacement.
Hydrogen is a tail chasing exercise for idiots long before you get to the problems it causes when using it.
Since you have to use fossil fuels to get hydrogen in the first place (hydrogen being the Elizabeth Taylor of elements,” always “married” to something else), better to just more efficiently use the fossil fuels directly to produce what is needed as opposed to wasting it in an effort to pretend to “do something” about an imaginary “crisis.”
More to the point, you’ll be using fossil fuels, whether directly or indirectly, to “acquire” hydrogen anyway.
If….
Only this morning I heard that 2 coal fired plants were being started up in the UK…
National Grid asks two coal plants to fire up amid big freeze
National Grid said the move to use two standby plants should ‘give the public confidence in Monday’s energy supply’
National Grid asks two coal plants to fire up amid big freeze | Evening Standard
Krupps seem to be stuffed, at least at home.
Now what they SHOULD do is give coal fired power “priority” over wind and solar that can’t be produced on demand.
And make that the “new normal.”
Germany can always get their steel from Russia.
Yeah maybe they can form that steel into a big tube and fill it with natural gas, too!
“HKM aims to replace its two blast furnaces in the years 2025 to 2045 so that they will gradually use more and more climate-neutral hydrogen.”
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Hydrogen is typically produced from natural gas, releasing co2. Why not simply use natural gas to produce steel?
Because that would make sense. And we have to remember that up is down etc
“there is currently no technology to make steel at scale without using coal.”
https://www.straterra.co.nz/lets-talk-about-coal-2/future-of-coal/making-steel-without-coal/
Yea! It’s called carbon steel.
Yep. Hybrit in Sweden is at the forefront of the hydrogen reduction method of making steel. It has produced 100 tonnes and is ramping up to 1.3m tonnes pa. It is currently 30% more costly than conventional steel.
Others are going along the same route as Hybrit but it will be a long time before they replace coking coal. In the last few years total world production of steel has been over 1.8 billion tonnes pa.
No doubt that once they close, lay off those thousands of workers, and lose their market share to China, their ESG score will rise.
Thought Germans were pretty smart. I guess not. Just like everyone else, they acquiesce to the pressure brought by the latest fad. This one just is taking longer to be debunked.
No actual proven data supports “climate change” existing, but its popular so there ya go.
For now.
No one should be surprised. This is the crux of the “plan”. Everyone knew this would happen and just sat back and watched it.
The world is becoming more and more like The Time Machine. The West are becoming the Eloi, and China the Morlocks.
And the news breathlessly told me that making iron from iron ore using hydrogen was competitive with using coke from coal. The steel mill is singing a different song.
Climate “transition” BS pales compared to the economic suicide being forced on Europe by the FAILED attempt to sanction Russia out of existence.
So far it has had far more destructive impact on Europe than on RF.
Not to mention the helping hand of our “allies” blowing up our energy infrastructure.