Tata Steel IJmuiden Heracless Green Steel Conversion, Velsen

Blast Furnace 7 was relined in 2022. The plan now is to shut it.

Tata Steel Nederland’s Heracless project would replace that furnace and Coke and Gas Plant 2 at IJmuiden with a direct reduced iron plant and an electric arc furnace, cutting roughly 5 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030. That is on the order of 3 percent of total Dutch national emissions from one site.

Project Scope

The works began as Koninklijke Hoogovens, founded in 1918, with the first blast furnace tapped in 1924. It is the largest industrial site in the Netherlands, producing about 7 million tonnes of crude steel a year and employing around 9,000 people.

Phase one is 2.5 Mtpa of hot and cold DRI plus one electric arc furnace, at roughly 1.5 billion euros. Danieli holds the basic engineering for the DRI plant and Tenova for the EAF. The technology selected is Energiron Zero Reformer, which runs on natural gas initially and is hydrogen-ready, and can produce hot and cold DRI in any proportion, which matters when the EAF and the caster downstream are being fed from an existing mill layout.

The Dutch government is negotiating a maatwerkafspraak with a state contribution reported around 2 billion euros. It is not signed. A final investment decision still sits with the Tata Steel board, and until it is taken every date here is conditional.

Why It Matters

Closing the coke and gas plant is not only a carbon decision. The IJmond region has years of local health complaints and RIVM public health studies behind it, and the coke plant is the specific source residents have organised around. Decarbonisation and nuisance abatement are pulling in the same direction here, which is not always the case.

The construction problem is the interesting one. This is a new primary process route being built inside a fully operating integrated mill, with the old route running until the new one can take over. Tie-in points, crane access, and the sequencing of gas systems around a live coke battery will set the programme. It is the largest single-site industrial decarbonisation retrofit in the Benelux, and the first one at this scale that other integrated mills in Europe can actually copy.

Project Team & Details