Even before its new electric arc furnace (EAF) at Donawitz in Leoben, Styria, has entered service, Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine is planning a further expansion. The company said in late June that, "subject to outstanding funding issues being resolved", it intends to invest around €100m to increase the capacity of the plant by 2030. This would enable Voestalpine to fully transition to electrified steel production at its Donawitz mill by the end of the decade.
The new EAF is expected to be commissioned on schedule in approximately one year. Beginning in 2027, Voestalpine wants to combine EAF steel production powered by green electricity with its conventional blast furnace process. This will mean that one blast furnace can be permanently shut down as early as 2029, according to the company. The EAF currently being built is designed for an annual production of around 850,000 tonnes of CO2-reduced steel, according to the company. The expansion will increase production capacity to as much as 1.5 million tonnes per year by 2030. The investment budget for this has already been approved by the supervisory board and will be used for, among other things, a further upgrade to the power supply, the construction of a third secondary metallurgy line and the expansion of scrap logistics.
In contrast to the site’s existing blast furnace-basic oxygen route, which relies on coal and coke, the EAF can be operated without fossil fuels. When announcing the start of construction in Donawitz in September 2023, Voestalpine said the EAF would use a mix of scrap, liquid pig iron and HBI (hot briquetted iron) to maintain high product quality.
As the group transitions to the new technology, the two blast furnaces and the sinter plant in Donawitz will be decommissioned. Jobs would be created at the new steel plant over the next three years and training and professional development programmes were already underway for employees, the company said. According to its CEO Herbert Eibensteiner, the transformation is indirectly securing the more than 5,000 jobs at the Metal Engineering Division’s Styrian locations.
Voestalpine launched its corporate climate action programme "Greentec Steel" in 2022. In spring 2023, the supervisory board approved investments of around €1.5bn for the first step of the decarbonisation strategy, which includes the construction of new EAF plants in Linz and Donawitz. The planned investment in the first phase remains unchanged, Voestalpine said last week.
By integrating electric arc furnaces operated with green electricity, the group aims to reduce its CO2 emissions by more than 30 per cent compared with 2019 from 2030 onwards. This equates to nearly 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year, representing almost 5 per cent of Austria’s CO2 emissions.
