Cleveland Cliffs Steel Plant Dumps Plan To Replace Coal-Powered Furnace With Hydrogen; More Coal. Please
It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland. Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ “economic savior” in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.
Neither the Cleveland-based steelmaker nor the Department of Energy, which put up $500 million to back the project, has formally pulled the plug on the plan to build a direct reduced iron plant capable of using hydrogen and two electric melting furnaces. But updates from the company in recent weeks suggest the ambitious carbon-free version of the project is all but dead.
On a first-quarter earnings call with investors last month, Cleveland-Cliffs’ CEO Lourenco Goncalves said the company was negotiating with the Department of Energy to “explore changes to the scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
Rather than use hydrogen, the green version of which remains expensive and in limited supply, Goncalves said the project would “instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.” At an event earlier this month hosted by the lobbying group American Iron and Steel Institute, Goncalves said the lack of a hydrogen-generating hub nearby made it impossible to source the fuel on the project’s timeline.
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https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/green-steel/cleveland-cliffs-middletown-trump
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