News

Within the scope of the NEFI Technology Talks on the 1st of September 2022, the closed project OxySteel was presented in front of guests from industry, research and politics.

Since numerous research projects for deploying new green technologies are already well underway, within the NEFI Technology Talk with the collaboration of the Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan) national (Austrian) and international industrial endeavours – in the context of selected decarbonisation topics – were presented and discussions encouraged.

Energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement and chemicals are responsible for a quarter of global GHG emissions. The potential for CO₂ avoidance is around 60 gigatonnes by 2030, but new technologies and innovations need to be developed until then, because around 2030 the next modernisation cycle is also due in this sector.

The Industrial Energy Efficiency Conference on 7 April 2022 in Wels showed that a step change in the industrial energy transition is a key factor both for economic competitiveness and the overall energy transition. It was part of the annual international conference World Sustainable Energy Days, held as a hybrid event with over 650 experts from 55 countries, 430 of them on-site in Wels.

In January 2022, the first of three new Oxyfuel ladle furnaces went into operation at the Breitenfeld Edelstahl AG steelworks. The so-called ladle furnaces are used to preheat the steelworks ladles, the transport and treatment vessels for liquid steel, and are responsible for a large part of the natural gas consumption and CO₂ emissions at the EAF steelworks.