From the outside, the steel mill complex at Cargnacco, a hamlet in the municipality of Pozzuolo del Friuli in northern Italy, looks like an ordinary industrial plant.

Except that at least one of the five production lines at the sprawling complex relies mainly on automated plant solutions.

Owned by ABS, the steelmaking division of Italian steel plant manufacturer Danieli Group, the 500,000 tonnes-a-year Saturno wire rod mill showcases the company's vision of the future steel plant: sustainable, automated and efficient.

The production line is designed and built according to Danieli’s zero-men-on-the-floor approach and relies on in-house developed as well as customised industrial internet-of-things (IIOT) solutions.

The endless humming of industrial equipment still permeates the entire production line, complete with health and safety procedures that visitors need to follow, and human staff, albeit in significantly reduced number, are still present at the plant.

However, a control centre, manned by at least two or three personnel who keep an eye on multiple monitoring screens, lies at the heart of the entire operations.

Equipment embedded with sensors and the “Danieli Automation” insignia can be found at nearly every turn of the production line. They transmit live data to the control centre, which processes them to help ensure machine productivity, anticipate any technical issues requiring intervention, and undertake predictive maintenance.

According to ABS, the plant’s manufacturing cycle is fully electrified, uses ferrous scrap and 94% of the plant’s raw material is recycled in its origin.

Products arising from the plant are supplied mainly to the automotive and mechanical engineering industries, followed by oil and gas, wind power and renewable energy, and mining sectors.

Also known as Quality Wire Rod 4.0, the mill has a fully automated warehouse, quick-changing system and inline inspection systems, in addition to the 360-degree control room.

The Saturno wire rod mill features a walking beam surface that the company says helps reduce its carbon footprint. The plant also features a “state-of-the-art” water treatment system.

“We are not starting from scratch [in terms of artificial intelligence],” notes  Rolando Paolone, CEO and chief technology officer of Danieli Group, citing decades of work behind Danieli Automation, the group's subsidiary specialising in industrial, operational and information technology solutions.

"We are talking about hundreds of research and development employees spending thousands of man-hours a week to develop AI solutions within the company," Paolone explains.

"Artificial intelligence is probably the largest area of investment for Danieli in the future," concurs Giacomo Mareschi Danieli, the company's group CEO.

Green steel promise

Electrification, waste heat recovery, recycled scrap, along with AI, promise to lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in one of the most hard-to-abate industries. Producing 1 tonne of steel using fossil fuel-fired blast furnaces creates nearly twice as much CO2, according to the latest data.

Danieli's W-Stop - a wireless backfire prevention system for electric arc furnace 

Every presentation during the two-day Danieli Innovaction Summit held in the company's headquarters in Buttrio in late May focused on potential decarbonisation solutions. Specifically, these include the adoption of electric arc furnaces instead of the old blast furnaces and the deployment of clean energies such as wind, solar, or even nuclear and green hydrogen.

“Our plan is to offer innovative solutions for steel making … to lower emissions and produce more of the so-called green steel,” notes Danieli Group’s CEO.

He points out the availability of features that allow waste heat recovery and carbon capture in its plant offerings. Danieli also notes that all of its direct-reduced iron burners are hydrogen-ready.

“The push must come from the market. These solutions are available but they are not yet convenient,” he explains, adding that future regulations such as the implementation of carbon tax, among others, could make these solutions more feasible in the future.

“We don’t have a silver bullet so we take small steps [toward decarbonising the industry],” Danieli explains.

The good news is most steel plant owners from Europe to Asia no longer plan to install additional blast furnaces.

However, expanding their production capacity using EAF presents higher costs. Needless to say, cleaning up the entire steel production supply chain will come with a steep price.

The use of clean hydrogen as a feedstock, for instance, could increase costs substantially while also imposing a challenge for steel plant owners to secure offtakes for hydrogen that does not yet exist.

“There is a lot of talk, and it is necessary to have these talks, but the implementation – especially the timeline for implementation to meet the 2030 CO2 reduction targets or of the 2050 net-zero targets, that’s something else,” an executive with a Sydney-based company who attended the event in Italy, tells MEED. "We will have to see."

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