MOWSES Six-Month Progress Meeting Held in Dillingen, Germany

This week, the project consortium came together for its first in-person progress meeting, hosted by our partner Dillinger in Dillingen, Germany. Over the course of two days, all work packages presented the progress made in the first six months of the project, followed by lively discussions—particularly around the development of the test matrix – and definition of the next steps.

To spotlight the expertise within the consortium, interviews with several of our experts were recorded and will be published later this year. The focus is to present the project, but also to develop an educational video-series explaining important basics of the steel making process to the public. We will answer questions such as: What is electric arc furnace, or why is traditional steel-making pollutive?

A highlight of the meeting was the guided tour at Dillinger’s rolling mill, where around 2 million tons of heavy plates are produced every year, making it the largest heavy-plate steel plant in Europe. We witnessed heavy plates with lengths of up to 40 m, widths of more than 5 m and thicknesses of up to 600 mm being produced and hot-rolled on site. Additionally, we visited a construction site where new facilities for the production of green steel are being built. In the future, instead of environmentally harmful raw materials such as coke and iron ore, recycled scrap and direct reduced iron will be used, significantly reducing the CO₂ footprint.

Even at night, the experience continued—hearing the distant honk of the specialised trains transporting liquid steel across the Saarland, we felt truly immersed in the world of steel.