Hyundai Steel evolving as hydrogen provider

As the car industry is moving fast to migrate to environmentally friendly energy sources, Hyundai Steel is going full steam ahead with its hydrogen business.

The steelmaker said Thursday that it will expand its hydrogen business to go in tandem with its biggest client Hyundai Motor Group’s fuel cell electric vehicle production. Hyundai Motor Group, in its Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Vision 2030 unveiled in 2018, said it would produce 500,000 FCEV units by 2030.

It was in 2016 that Hyundai Steel started to produce hydrogen for commercial purposes, by using the byproduct gases generated from its steel mills. The company started construction of its hydrogen plant at the Dangjin Integrated Steel Mills in 2014.

The hydrogen plant currently produces up to 3,500 metric tons of hydrogen annually, according to the steelmaker. The annual production volume is enough to fuel 17,000 units of Hyundai Motor’s FCEV Nexo all year around, based on the premise that each of the vehicles operates 20,000 kilometers in a year. Nexo has a drive range of 609 km upon a single charge of 6.33 kilograms of hydrogen.

Hyundai Steel recently laid out the company’s future plan for its hydrogen business in a video. The company pledged to increase its hydrogen production capacity tenfold by 2025, aiming to produce 40,000 tons of hydrogen a year. That would be enough to operate 200,000 units of Nexo all year round.

“With the goal to make our steel mill eco-friendly, we are actively promoting resource circulation and recycling,” Hyundai Steel Chief Executive Officer Ahn Dong-il said. “We will continue to work on hydrogen production and environment-friendly energy sources to make our steel plant the world’s best eco-friendly steel plant.”

Hyundai Steel produces hydrogen by separating hydrogen from coke oven gas (COG), a type of byproduct gas generated in the coke production process within the steel mill, the company explained.

Coke, a type of coal, is used as fuel in iron ore smelting. COG is generated in the production process and the company purifies the COG to get rid of tar, sulfur and naphthalene.

The COG goes through several purification processes involving an electrostatic precipitator, an activated carbon tower and Temperature Swing Adsorption techniques, to make the hydrogen 99.999 percent pure -- called “five nines” -- the company explained.

“Strict conditions should be met to use the five nines for fuel cell vehicles,” a Hyundai Steel official said.

Half of the hydrogen produced from Hyundai Steel’s Dangjin steel plant is supplied for fuel cell EVs, and for semiconductor cleaning process. The rest is used at the plant for preventing product oxidation, the company said.

Hyundai Steel is also a producer of metal bipolar plates, which are key materials of the fuel cell system used in the vehicles.

Next to the hydrogen plant, the company produces enough metal bipolar plates that can be applied to about 16,000 FCEV units a year, the company said. 

The steelmaker started developing the technologies for mass production of metal bipolar plates in 2013, and kicked off mass production in 2018.

The company stressed that its production facility for the bipolar plates is 100 percent domestically constructed, and the technologies used are also developed here.

Hyundai Steel said it will lead the way into the hydrogen era through continued research and development.

“We should shift our focus from value growth to profitability to resettle the corporate identity as a strong steelmaker and take preemptive moves to gear up for the future,” Ahn said, adding that the company should be open to new business sectors for future growth.

By Jo He-rim (herim@heraldcorp.com)