Project highlight: EMSTEEL’s green steel pilot

UAE

In October 2024, Masdar and EMSTEEL, the UAE’s largest steel manufacturing company, successfully completed a pilot to produce low-carbon steel using green hydrogen as fuel instead of natural gas.

EMSTEEL’s trial represents a promising step towards curbing emissions from a hard-to-abate industrial process and bolsters the UAE’s potential to become an international hub for hydrogen and green steel production.

SPECIFICATIONS: Green hydrogen was produced at EMSTEEL’s operational facilities through water electrolysis in a process fueled by renewable power from the national grid. The hydrogen was then used to replace natural gas in the process of extracting iron from iron ore, one of the first fundamental steps to making steel.

KEY PLAYERS: Abu Dhabi-listed EMSTEEL is the UAE’s largest steel and building materials manufacturer, with a total steel production capacity of 3.5 million tonnes per year (tpy) and a 60% share of the UAE steel market. The company is backed by state-owned renewable energy giant Masdar, which owns a global portfolio of decarbonisation assets with the capacity to offset 30 million tpy of carbon dioxide. The green hydrogen produced by the project was certified by Advance Labs following ISO 19870 methodology, and Bureau Veritas validated the certification data as a third-party assurance provider.

TIMELINE: EMSTEEL began installing electrolysers at the test facility in late 2023, and the pilot project began in 2024. Following the successful trials, in November 2024 Masdar and EMSTEEL launched a feasibility study to ramp up the production of green steel. In December of 2024, urban real estate developer Modon partnered with EMSTEEL to incorporate low-carbon steel into new construction projects.

SIGNIFICANCE: Traditional steelmaking is carbon-intensive, and the industry contributes about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually. Steel is vitally important for the UAE’s booming construction sector and muscular infrastructure development plans and decarbonising hard-to-abate industrial sectors is a key element of the UAE’s NET Zero 2050 Strategy. EMSTEEL pilot is a valuable demonstration of the potential of incorporating hydrogen into steel production.
Masdar has been a pioneer in green steel production since 2008 and aims to become a leading producer of green hydrogen by 2030. The company aims to reach 1 million tpy of green hydrogen or equivalent derivatives in the UAE and globally by 2030. As a first-of-its-kind in the Middle East, the pilot’s success sets an important benchmark for further developments and similar applications elsewhere in the region.
With a tapering of technology costs and a successful scaling up of EMSTEEL’s green production process, the UAE could satisfy internal demand with lower environmental impact. The country is also positioning itself to capture the huge growth opportunities that will emerge from rising global demand for low-carbon steel, marking an important step towards its ambition to become a hydrogen and green steel production hub.

Photo courtesy of EMSTEEL

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