Investing in research, development and technology
We offer our customers solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the complete life-cycle of our products.
Corus has committed an additional £1.2m (EUR 1.6m) annually to fund an internal climate change research programme. A series of workshops has been held with process, energy, environment and product development experts to develop the programme. The largest work stream will focus on process efficiency to achieve our emissions reduction target of at least 20% by 2020, compared to 1990.
As described earlier, there is an insurmountable scientific barrier to further significant reductions of CO2 emissions from the conventional iron and steelmaking process. As a result, the production of hot metal via the blast furnace route needs to be placed on a completely new technological path if a step change in emissions is to be realised. Corus is a major partner in ULCOS (Ultra-Low CO2 Steelmaking), a EUR59m (£43m) European research project to investigate technologies that could bring about this step-change reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. Corus RD&T is contributing significant expertise to the ULCOS project, and manages three of the five sub-projects. To date, four breakthrough technologies have been identified: blast furnace top gas recycling; ISARNA (a new smelting reduction process with very high efficiency); advance direct reduction; and electrolysis. Additional supporting technologies include carbon capture and storage and use of carbon from sustainable biomass. For more information visit www.ULCOS.org
The ULCOS partners, including Corus and the European Commission, are working towards ULCOS II; large scale demonstrator projects of one or two of the breakthrough technologies from 2010 to 2015. This will involve considerable additional R&D investment by the ULCOS partners and the European Commission. If ULCOS II is successful, the technology could potentially be rolled out some 15 to 20 years from now.
