Danieli will supply a hybrid DRI plant for the Ternium plant in Mexico

The project will contribute to the fulfillment of Ternium's obligations regarding the decarbonization of production by 2030

Danieli, one of the leading European and global producers of equipment for steel industry, will supply a hybrid hydrogen plant for the Ternium steel plant in Mexico. This is stated in the message of Danieli.

The new Energiron DRI plant, which will be installed at Ternium’s Pesqueria plant in Nuevo Leon, will provide high-quality direct reduced iron to the company’s new steelmaking facilities.

The DRI plant is part of a project aimed at integrating Ternium’s downstream operations to meet the requirements of the USMCA Agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada to determine the origin of steel products on a smelted and cast basis, and also contributes to the company’s commitment to decarbonize its operations by 2030.

The new 2.1 million tpa DRI plant will be equipped with the leading direct reduction technology Energiron, jointly developed by Tenova and Danieli. The hybrid technology allows the use of natural gas as a reducing agent with the subsequent possibility of using 100% hydrogen or any mixture of the two. As noted, the use of some natural gas in the direct reduction process is advisable to add the minimum amount of carbon required during smelting to produce steel.

In addition, the technology has the ability to capture CO₂, which can further reduce the plant’s overall carbon emissions and provide another source of revenue for the company.

In February 2023, Ternium announced that it plans to invest about $2.2 billion in the construction of a steelmaking shop based on an electric arc furnace with a capacity of 2.6 million tons per year, as well as a direct reduction iron (DRI) module with a capacity of 2.1 million tons per year. At the time, it was noted that the company was considering several sites in the USMCA region. In June, Ternium chose the current production site in Nueva León. The DRI plant is expected to be built by the first half of 2026.

As GMK Center reported earlier, in June 2023 the Chinese steel company HBIS successfully produced an industrial batch of direct reduction iron (DRI) using the Energiron technology, which involves enrichment of coke gas with hydrogen by more than 60%. In total, HBIS plans to expand hydrogen-based DRI production capacity to 1.2 million t/year.