Stegra green steel plant, Boden

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An integrated hydrogen-based steel plant under construction at Boden in Norrbotten, northern Sweden, by the company formerly named H2 Green Steel and renamed Stegra in 2024. Its design is the clearest commercial statement of what fossil-free primary steel would require: an on-site electrolyser array of several hundred megawatts, a direct-reduction shaft producing sponge iron with hydrogen instead of coke, and electric arc furnaces to melt it — all sited in northern Sweden specifically because the local grid is dominated by hydropower and cheap enough to make electrolytic hydrogen viable. It is included here as a real project rather than a concept, and with its difficulties stated: the venture raised one of the largest green-industrial financing packages in Europe, and its cost and schedule were the subject of substantial adverse reporting during 2025. The general lesson survives whatever happens to this particular plant. Hydrogen steel is not blocked by chemistry; it is blocked by the price of very large quantities of low-carbon electricity, and it will be built where that electricity is cheapest rather than where the steel is currently made.