Corporate Responsibility Report 2022-2023
Outcome 05 – Trusted user of air, land and water
ArcelorMittal Belgium’s environmental performance is among the best in the European steel industry. Approximately 10% of our annual investment budget is allocated to environmental investments. Our approach has been rewarded several times with various awards and with the Voka Charter for Sustainable Business. We see this as recognition for our efforts and an incentive to continue the path we have chosen.
Dust control
Dust control is a top priority in our environmental policy. As a result of the many investments we have made, our dust emissions today are below 10% of the dust emissions of the early 1990s.
Our projects
A dust study, for which we commissioned VITO (2005-2006), demonstrated that diffuse emissions are particularly likely to affect the air quality in the environment of our site. In the last few years, we have therefore paid special attention to controlling this specific type of emissions. We bundled all improvement actions within a dust reduction plan running over several years, made interim adjustments and supplemented the plan with new measures.
Some of our achievements:
- New harbour cranes with more effective sprinkling system and wind screens.
- The application of a coating (incrustator) on the piles of raw materials in dry and windy weather and placing dust barriers to prevent wind erosion.
- In 2017, we installed a sleeve filter installation on the casting floor of blast furnace B (€11 million). We converted and expanded the dust filter installations in our sinter plants. A new hybrid filter was commissioned in sinter plant 1. At sinter plant 2, we commissioned a sleeve filter (amounting to a combined €21.5 million). The investments led to a sharp reduction in guided dust emissions since 2018, 75% of which comes from the sinter plants.
- Construction of a 10 m high and 870 m long dust barrier/wind dike along the Ghent-Terneuzen canal to prevent wind erosion of the coalyards. The wind dike was completed mid-2019. Construction of a second dust barrier/wind dike along the Kennedylaan to reduce dust emissions towards Sint-Kruis-Winkel in 2022.
- A thorough sweeping programme to keep the roads within our site dust-free.
- An alert system in accordance with the weather conditions.
- Introduction of a color-coding system at the raw materials department to avoid dust emissions in adverse meteorological conditions (2020).
- We continued efforts to improve air quality, including the installation of a waste gas recirculation system at the sinter plants commissioned in mid-2021 (€13 million). Moreover, in May 2022, a new hybrid filter (combination of electrostatic and bag filter) was commissioned at the cooler of sinter plant 2 (€1 million). Thanks to these investments the dust load emitted in the sinter plant was halved compared to the previous years.
- We also invested in further dust abatement at the blast furnace area with a renewal of the stockhouse dedusting at blast furnace A (end 2023) and a new dedusting stockhouse at blast furnace B foreseen for 2024.
Performance excellence awards for the sinter plants
At the end of July 2023, the ‘Performance Excellence Awards’ were announced within ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products. ArcelorMittal Belgium was in the top 3 in almost all categories. For the ‘operational excellence’ category, the sinter plants team took home gold with a project to significantly reduce dust emissions.
In recent years there has been strong investment in new dedusting systems for sinter plant 2. Just think of the new sleeve filter in 2017 or the flue gas recirculation in 2021. At the end of 2022, we examined how we could further reduce our dust footprint with our existing facilities.
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In the past, the main focus was on the dust emissions from our plants in normal, stable operating conditions, but now we also wanted to address dust emissions in non-regular situations, such as during a shutdown or a restart of a plant after a downtime. We considered all installations with environmental impact: the sleeve filter, the flue gas recirculation, and the “bypass” for the residual gas. We wanted to improve the safety, (dedusting) capacity and operational reliability of all these installations by looking for synergies between them. As a result, our dust footprint has been reduced by more than 60%, while also significantly reducing or even avoiding visual disturbance during a downtime was significantly reduced or even avoided. This benefits our own employees, contractors, and neighbours.
Start-up of new coke gas desulphurizing installation
At the end of July 2023, ArcelorMittal Gent’s new coke gas desulphurizing installation was started up. It involved an investment of €29 million.
The new desulphurizing installation, which is a copy of the existing plant, ensures that during maintenance outages of one of the two desulphurizing installations, the other installation guarantees the purification of the coke oven gas. Until previously, the backup of the existing installation did not have the same performance level as the desulphurizing installation itself, leading to higher emission levels. With this investment, emissions, as last seen in the spring of 2023, will be completely avoided.
Monitoring emissions
All other emissions, such as NOx, SOx, and dioxins, are carefully monitored by means of an intensive internal measurement programme. It enables us to monitor the proper exploitation of the production and purification installations and make immediate adjustments when necessary. As far as the NOx and SO2 emissions are concerned, we also take proactive steps by carefully selecting raw materials with a relatively low level of nitrogen (N) and sulphur (S). The reason the emissions have had a negative trend in the recent years (like 2023) is linked to the high impact of the type of fuels we use in our sinter plants. Here, unfortunately, we are dependent on availability and economic market situations, and due to the embargo on Russian products we were and are not able to buy low S-containing fuels.
Soil
| 11/2008 Blast furnace 6 at Seraing is shut down. | 12/2016 Blast furnace 6 at Seraing is demolished. The terrain will be cleared after which the soil decontamination will take place. The terrain will become part of an urbanization project of the city of Liège. The demolition and remediation are in line with the global agreement signed in February 2014 between the Walloon Region and ArcelorMittal. Phase 1, i.e., the soil decontamination of the undeveloped areas, has been completed. | Since 2018, soil studies for the implementation of phase 2 have been conducted. The land is part of a large-scale redevelopment project in line with the city of Seraing’s master plan. |
As part of the renewal of the Marchin environmental permit (HP5), a soil study was carried out. The results are generally good, but the groundwater needs to be monitored.
As part of the adoption of the BREF FMP, a European Reference Document for Best Available Techniques for Ferro Metals Processing industries), a soil study will have to be carried out in 2023 & 2024 on the Ramet site. It will be submitted to the authorities in the second quarter of 2024.
As part of the renewal of the Kessales environmental permit, a soil study had to be carried out in 2023 & 2024.
Water
The steel production process requires enormous amounts of water, which is used as cooling water, as process water and for environmental applications. As water is a natural resource, we use it with the utmost care.
The role of water in our production process
| Cooling water | Process water | Environmental use |
|---|---|---|
| It is important to cool our installations as our production process involves high temperatures. We, for example, cool the motors of the sinter plants, the shell of the blast furnaces, the converter of the steel shop and the rolling stands of the hot strip mill. | Process water is used in our production process itself. This involves for example the water that we use to extinguish coke, to granulate blast furnace slag into blast furnace sand, to remove the oxide scale of the steel slabs in the hot strip mill as well as the water that we convert into steam. | We also use water for dust control (for the spraying of unpaved roads in dry weather and in the sprinkling installations on harbour cranes when unloading dust-sensitive raw materials) and in the gas scrubbing installations of the blast furnaces and the steel shop. |
ArcelorMittal Liège
The water used by ArcelorMittal Liège for the production process and for the cooling of its installations comes mainly from the Meuse and its tributary, the Hoyoux, as far as our Marchin production site is concerned. The water is purified after use and checked before it is
rejected to the Meuse or the Hoyou.
As part of the authorization for the ‘La Chatqueue’ external landfill site in Seraing, the water collected will be rejected to the Cornillon stream. This process is continuously measured and the quality of the water at this stage is of such quality that no additional treatment is required.
Water treatment plants have been equipped with new instruments for measuring wastewater, which make it possible to increase the reliability (calibration, maintenance, implementation). A new data backup system has also been put in place in place.
Wastewater treatment plant
On September 20, 2022, Eurogal-Ramet’s new wastewater treatment plant, which has been operational since the end of May, was officially inaugurated. The new plant guarantees the treatment of wastewater from the cleaning of cold rolled coils as well as from the demineralization plant, according to the strictest environmental standards. In fact, the plant has been developed to comply with regulations that will be imposed in the future, with a view to protecting flora and fauna. Independent checks are carried out periodically and on a random basis. These check both the physical (temperature, quantity, flow rate, etc.) and chemical (conductivity, pH, etc.) properties of the water sent to the Meuse. Moreover, the water to be treated no longer needs to be transported several kilometers to another location, so the risk of contamination in the event of a leak is significantly reduced.
ArcelorMittal Gent
The main source of water for the Ghent site is the Ghent-Terneuzen canal. The canal water is pumped up to the north of the company grounds and goes in counter-current through the production process to ultimately be returned to the canal further south, after treatment in wastewater treatment plants, so that the applicable discharge standards are respected. Every cubic metre of water we pump up is re-used about 25 times. The past two years, we saw a decrease of the recycling rate. This is due to a general trend that less water can be recovered due to prolonged drought and to the high conductivity of the canal water Ghent-Terneuzen the last two years.
In the past we also used groundwater for a few applications. Today, most groundwater is only pumped up for safety reasons. For example, in some places within our site we must keep the groundwater level low as contact with liquid hot metal from the blast furnaces or liquid steel from the steel shop could cause an explosion. In order not to lose this groundwater afterwards, we use it in a few quality-critical applications.
As such, in 2022, we didn’t extend the permit for artesian ground water extraction since we don’t need it anymore.
Due to the salinization of the canal water, which will increase after the opening of the new sea lock in Terneuzen in the fourth quarter of 2024, we will encounter problems with, among other things, the internal production of osmosis water (class B) in which conductivities will peak above 200 uS/cm (target class B is < 100 uS/cm).
That is why in the coming years we will invest heavily in seawater membranes (with high-pressure pumps) to replace the current brackish water membranes in the reverse osmosis plants, which is the only solution to keep up with the quality, knowing that during dry summers such as the one in 2022 the conductivity was around 14,000 uS/cm. With the commissioning of the new sea lock, it is expected to almost double.
Biodiversity
We realized an in-depth biodiversity study in collaboration with a third party (ecological engineering firm) in 2023 for our site in Ghent. In this study an extensive inventory of the fauna and flora was created via 1 to 2 site visits per month in the period April to September. Specific search efforts were carried out for species groups such as birds, mammals, bats, amphibians, and various insect groups using wildlife cameras, bat detectors and amphibian traps, among other things. After intensive research, no fewer than 553 plant and animal species were observed. General species richness is higher in the Rostijne sub-area (480 species) compared to the Arbed sub-area (296 species). The main reason for this is a greater variety of vegetation and site characteristics, with a greater proportion of dry and moist open vegetation types in the Rostijne sub-area. In contrast to the diversity of species, the high natural value of the site is mainly due to the presence of more mature and, at first sight, species-poor forest vegetation such as coniferous and poplar plantations.
A better understanding of the local biodiversity enables us to protect it and protected nature in our zone of influence as ArcelorMittal Belgium strives to diminish and prevent potential negative impacts on the biodiversity. Similar studies will be conducted for all ArcelorMittal Belgium sites.
