Tenaris, Snam and Tenova marks the start of Italy’s first test using hydrogen at a steel plant for steel processing
The collaboration between Snam, one of Europe’s main energy infrastructure operators, TenarisDalmine, a Tenaris company and a global leader in pipe manufacturing and related services for the energy industry, and Tenova, a leading developer and supplier of sustainable solutions for the green transition of the metallurgical industry, will initially be for six months, to evaluate the performance and reliability of using hydrogen in the steel industry and, more generally, the hard-to-abate sectors that are the most challenging to decarbonise.
The goal is to use hydrogen produced on-site to fuel a burner recently developed by Tenova (100% H2 ready) installed in a reheating furnace to hot roll seamless pipes at the TenarisDalmine plant in Dalmine (Bergamo), Italy. The test 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.
TenarisDalmine will provide the site and reheating furnace, contributing its know-how to the installation, operation and performance monitoring of the steel plants. Using its expertise in hydrogen-related technologies and molecule transport, Snam will make an alkaline electrolysis system available to TenarisDalmine, which will operate it to produce the hydrogen needed for the test. Tenova, in turn, completes the value chain of the process by pooling its know-how on combustion systems and, in particular, supplying burners specifically made to be fuelled with hydrogen.
The project also included a significant contribution from Techint Engineering & Construction, a company that provides design and project management services and is continuously expanding in the energy transition field, 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 at the TenarisDalmine plant, Snam is supporting a major industry player in the Hydrogen as a Service modality, an ad hoc service to enable the use of decarbonised hydrogen in industrial production plants or other application environments, in which Snam leases the electrolysis system to the end user, who will operate it. The programme is part of Snam’s broader efforts, as a system operator, to guide the needs of industrial companies on their path to decarbonise processes that need to be tested given future large-scale infrastructure solutions.
In turn, the companies of the Techint Group (TenarisDalmine, Tenova and Techint Engineering & Construction) consolidate their know-how in developing, implementing and validating the technologies required to decarbonise hard-to-abate industries by gradually replacing fossil fuels with green hydrogen.
