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Dominik Schöne walks through a workshop that looks like a huge gray bunker. Sparks are flying here and there, the cold is creeping in, there is a slightly acrid smell in the air, phosphorus. The Dillinger Hütte with its blast furnaces, coke ovens and melting pots appears archaic, like a walk-in industrial monument in the north of Saarbrücken. That’s deceptive, says Schöne, deputy plant manager of the steelworks, “a lot of things here are ultra-modern.” They control the system from a control center, sensors help everywhere, and several hundred IT people work in the company.
Beautiful, wiry engineer and doctor of metallurgy, has been working here for 15 years, his entire professional life. As head of the foundry, he is responsible for the so-called “liquid phase” of production, as it is called in smelting jargon. To do this, the molten iron, which is over a thousand degrees hot, is transported from the blast furnace to the converter, a kind of giant pot, where it is boiled into steel. They produce four to five million tons a year here together with their sister plant in Völklingen, fourth place in the German steel industry.
But the process is a thing of the past: too expensive, too dirty, no longer competitive – far too much CO₂ that is released. It’s the coke that messes up the balance sheet. The smelter still needs the hard coal product to split iron ore and produce liquid pig iron, the basis for steel. But at the Dillinger Hütte, founded in 1685, Schöne and colleagues have been working on a new way to produce steel for a long time: with electric furnaces and with hydrogen instead of coal. The result would be green steel. A crucial building block for the energy and climate transition.
It’s just that all plans have been up in the air since November 15th. On that Wednesday, the Federal Constitutional Court effectively blocked the billions in loans from the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF), which were intended for hundreds of large-scale projects in Germany. The lawyers decided that it violates the constitution if unused funds from the Corona aid are simply reallocated for other purposes.
Since then, the future has been in limbo in many places in Germany: measures for climate protection, for the conversion of production companies and for the establishment of new industries in structurally weak regions are in jeopardy. An embarrassment for politicians, a budget disaster for the federal government. Only after much back and forth were the traffic light parties able to agree on a compromise.
And Saarland is particularly affected by Berlin’s chaos, the smallest federal state with almost a million inhabitants. Nowhere in Germany is there greater pressure to convert old energy-intensive industries to modern production processes. Steel makers, car and machine manufacturers as well as metal companies, along with hundreds of suppliers and processors, are concentrated here in a very small space. Three quarters of all employees work in these sectors, which are closely interwoven. Seen this way, Saarland is Germany under the magnifying glass. And if you want to know what kind of problems the industry is facing as a result of the suddenly overturned funding measures, all you have to do is look here.
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