The Namibian government and its partners have started work on Africa’s biggest Industrial Green Steel production plant at Arandis.
The N$600m HyIron Oshivela Project is a venture involving the government, the German Ministry of Economy and Climate Action.
The project will use the HyIron technology, an innovative process to reduce iron ore in a rotary kiln with the help of green hydrogen, thus entirely carbon neutral.
Johannes Micheles, HyIron’s managing director, said Project Oshivela shows that it is possible to run carbon-free industries.
Micheles also said Namibia is a perfect place for the project due to open spaces, wind, iron ore and political stability.
Rainer Baake, Special Envoy for German-Namibian Energy and Climate Cooperation, highlights its importance in establishing a green hydrogen economy and decarbonizing downstream industries. Moreover, this endeavour places Namibia at the forefront of the green industrial transition. “For example, the sponge iron produced here can also be used as a preliminary product in steel production in Germany to manufacture green steel for the production of wind turbines or vehicles,” he said.
In the first project phase, an annual output of 15,000 tonnes of DRI (Direct Reduced Iron) is planned at the cost of N$255m (13 million euros).
With a planned start in late 2024, Oshivela will be one of the biggest primary production sites of green iron worldwide.
At this stage, the project is expected to avoid 27,000 CO₂ emissions per year, equivalent to 50% of the CO₂ emissions of Namibia’s Power industry.
A key advantage of the HyIron technology is its modularity, which allows for rapid expansion of production capacities: A feasibility study is currently being conducted to evaluate the mid-term capacity expansion to 1 million tonnes of green iron per year, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 1,8 Million tonnes CO₂e every year.
Global demand for iron is projected to increase rapidly from 1.9 billion tonnes per year (current) to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2030. To meet this rising demand, additional production capacities of 50 million tonnes have to be added each year.
Given that solar and wind power are the most cost-effective energy resources today, new production capacities must take this transition into account and employ technologies built on these carbon-free resources.
HyIron is a proven technology that enables this transition and allows scaling alongside the availability of renewable energies.
The resulting iron has unprecedented purity levels, which allows for high-quality steel production at reduced energy and material usage at the steel factory or foundry.
The Oshivela project, with an annual production potential of 1 million tonnes of iron per year, is projected to avoid 1.8 million tonnes of CO₂e/year.
If applied to the needed additional production capacities of 300 million tonnes until 2030, 540 million tonnes of CO₂e could be avoided yearly by 2030, providing an enormous contribution to the fight against climate change.
