voestalpine Is Dropping Electric Arc Furnaces Into Two Working Steel Mills

voestalpine isn’t building a new steel plant. It’s inserting electric arc furnaces into two mills that are still making steel, at Leoben-Donawitz in Styria and at Linz in Upper Austria, without stopping production at either.

Project Scope

At Donawitz that means a new steelmaking hall and furnace standing alongside the existing blast furnaces, sinter plant and LD converters. At Linz it means a 180-tonne EAF. Both sites need transformer and grid-connection work sized for loads above 100 megawatts, new scrap handling and charging infrastructure, hydrogen storage provision, and tie-ins to the existing casting and rolling lines. Danieli is supplying the Donawitz furnace and Primetals Technologies the one at Linz. The program carries a budget of about EUR 1.5 billion across both sites, roughly EUR 1 billion of it at Linz, with EUR 400 to 500 million of spend falling in 2026 alone. About 750 workers are on site daily this year, a number the company expects to pass 1,200. The steel structure of the Linz hall topped out in July 2026, and both furnaces are due to run from 2027.

Why It Matters

Green-steel announcements are cheap. Building inside a live integrated mill is not, and this is one of the few European decarbonisation programs that has moved past the memorandum stage into steel erection with a named furnace supplier and a topping-out date. The interface problem is the real work. Every tie-in has to be sequenced around campaigns that can’t be interrupted, on a site where the existing process still runs on coke. voestalpine expects a CO2 reduction of about 30 percent against 2019 once both furnaces operate, roughly 4 million tonnes a year, which is close to 5 percent of Austria’s total emissions. Whether that number survives contact with commissioning is the thing worth watching.

Project Team & Details