Nippon Steel's Hasaki pilot shaft furnace has now produced a cumulative total of more than 1,000 tonnes of direct reduced iron (DRI) using 100% hydrogen as the reducing agent — and, more consequentially, using ordinary blast-furnace-grade pellets rather than the scarce, expensive direct-reduction-grade ore that conventional gas-based DRI requires.
The company announced the result on 4 November 2026. The headline number is impressive for a 1 t/h pilot, but the strategically load-bearing claim is the feedstock. Almost every hydrogen-DRI roadmap in the world assumes access to DR-grade pellets — a small fraction of seaborne iron ore that is simultaneously being chased by green-steel projects on three continents. Demonstrating that a shaft furnace can tolerate the cheaper, far more abundant grade attacks both a supply bottleneck and a cost premium at once.
What was actually built
The Hasaki Research & Development Center in Kamisu City, Ibaraki Prefecture, hosts a shaft furnace approximately 60 m tall with a 1 t/h production capacity. It began operating in March 2026. Nippon Steel's own investor materials describe a site of roughly 80 m × 200 m, built adjacent to a test electric furnace, configured with the same process flow and equipment train as a commercial plant so that reduction, cooling and briquetting can be evaluated as an integrated chain.
That 60-metre column is worth pausing on. At 1 t/h the unit is unmistakably a pilot — roughly 10,000 t/yr equivalent — but the height is not a capacity scale-up, it is a process geometry scale-up. Shaft furnaces depend on ore residence time and gas–solid heat exchange over a tall bed; a short furnace would generate data that does not transfer. Hasaki's value lies in producing commercially relevant residence times and gas utilisation at pilot throughput.
The work sits inside the NEDO Green Innovation Fund programme "Hydrogen Utilization in Iron and Steelmaking Processes," adopted in late December 2021 and selected in January 2022, with a maximum budget of ¥439.16 billion across the whole programme. Nippon Steel leads the direct hydrogen reduction strand; JFE Steel and Kobe Steel participate alongside JRCM through the GREINS consortium.
Reading the 1,000-tonne number correctly
Nippon Steel's wording is "cumulative total" (累計). At 1 t/h, 1,000 tonnes implies roughly 1,000 operating hours, of which more than 300 hours were a single continuous campaign. The figure is therefore accumulated across multiple campaigns, not one heroic run.
The sequencing matters. NEDO's own project reporting recorded an earlier interim milestone — a 72-hour continuous run on 100% hydrogen — before the November announcement. The progression from 72 hours to 300-plus continuous hours, and from a first campaign to a four-figure cumulative total, is the real evidence of stabilisation.
The two problems the pilot was built to solve
Nippon Steel names two technical barriers and two countermeasures, and they are the right ones:
| Barrier | Why it matters | Stated countermeasure |
|---|---|---|
| Hydrogen-only reduction is endothermic | Furnace temperature drops; reaction kinetics and product quality suffer | "Optimal thermal compensation technology"; NEDO cites hydrogen preheating specifically |
| Low-grade ore generates fines during reduction | Degrades gas permeability and reaction control; can force shutdowns | "Operational techniques that suppress powdering" |
The second is the harder and more commercially interesting one. Blast-furnace pellets are not formulated for the reducing conditions of a hydrogen shaft, and fines generation in a packed bed is a productivity killer: it raises pressure drop, channels the gas, and erodes the specific output per cubic metre of shaft. Nippon Steel has claimed a suppression technique but has not disclosed fines rates, metallisation degree, carbon content, hydrogen flowrates or operating temperatures — precisely the numbers a technical evaluator would need to judge how much productivity was sacrificed to achieve ore flexibility.
Why this differs from other hydrogen-DRI demonstrations
Hydrogen DRI is not new. MIDREX and HYL have run hydrogen-enriched shafts for years, and HYBRIT in Sweden has advanced its own hydrogen-reduction route. Japan's domestic landscape is also getting crowded: in mid-2026, JFE Steel produced roughly 1 tonne of DRI at its 15 kg/h Chiba pilot using green hydrogen trucked from Komekurayama in Yamanashi — announced as Japan's first DRI from green hydrogen, and a much smaller, feedstock-logistics-oriented experiment than Hasaki's.
The distinguishing claim at Hasaki is the combination of 100% hydrogen (no natural gas blending) with blast-furnace-grade pellets. The company frames the market contrast bluntly: around 100 million t/yr of DRI is produced globally today, essentially all via natural-gas reduction, which emits CO2. Substituting hydrogen is the climate story; substituting ore grade is the economics story.
Where the project stands — and what is genuinely open
The pilot is operational. A NEDO/METI-tracked plan describes construction completion in September 2025 and scale-up study and demonstration from 2027, with implementation technology targeted for around 2040. The furnace itself, its steel structures and its equipment train are built and running.
Industry readers should be clear about the commercial signal here: this is a research facility, not a procurement pipeline. No EPC contractor, furnace licensor or steel fabricator has been publicly identified for the Hasaki unit, and no value, schedule or tender information has been disclosed for any future commercial plant. Any suggestion of open steel packages on this project should be treated as unevidenced. A commercial-scale facility remains a concept, contingent on the 2027-onward scale-up programme and on a corporate investment decision not yet taken.
What the pilot's next campaigns must deliver is less dramatic than a press milestone but more decisive commercially: sustained metallisation quality, quantified fines behaviour on BF-grade pellets, and the energy penalty of hydrogen preheating. If those numbers hold up, Nippon Steel will have shown that hydrogen DRI need not be hostage to the DR-grade pellet market — which is the single most useful thing the Japanese programme could contribute to the global green-steel transition.
- 2026-03-01Pilot shaft furnace (~60 m tall, 1 mt/h capacity) began operations at the Hasaki R&D Center.
- 2026-11-04Nippon Steel announced production of more than 1,000 mt of DRI using 100% hydrogen and low-grade iron ore over more than 300 hours of continuous operation.