Okay

so we were talking about direct reduction.

So direct reduction as a reminder means we're going from iron ore to hot metal in solid

form as not melted hot metals but we're going to be a complete solid-state process and we're

doing this by essentially following a reduction road and then having a melting road.

So it's reduction plus melting which is a little bit different from our blast furnace

which is called indirect reduction road because we go to a highly reduced product.

There's a lot of carbon in there that we then burn off to go to our raw steel.

This is what we talked about so far.

And the upside of that at least historically was it's much easier to build efficiently as a small

furnace and also to run it up and down.

Blast furnace has to run continuously.

If you stop a blast furnace it will cost you if you do it planned it will cost you about 100

million euros if it's a sort of mid-sized one.

If you do it unplanned we're talking like 300 million.

So it gets really expensive.

This is why you never switch it off.

Direct reduction plant you can switch off and on.

This is why we very often had those at locations where we had potentially cheap energy and where

we also may have good access to iron ore.

So my favorite example was always the first apina plant at Corpus Christi in Texas which is

the natural gas hub there.

So whenever a natural gas sunk below a certain amount of a certain price that would just run

up the direct reduction plant.

This would be a classical use case for it.

And so we're not going to talk too much about HIL because it's very relatively similar to

mid-rex in terms of in terms of what it does.

But essentially the market leader is Midland Ross with the mid-rex process and comparable

ones and we're going to talk about that one later on a little bit more in depth.

And essentially the production we've usually been around 100 million tons recently.

100 million tons means out of the entire steel production is about 5%.

It's not much but it's also not nothing.

So it's not a process.

So usually do you know what TRL is?

Yes, technology readiness level.

And it goes from?

No, 1 to 10.

So TRL 1 to 10.

And you can look up the definitions.

It's actually NASA came up with that.

So essentially when you go to NASA with the technology they are going to ask you what

is your technology TRL 1 or is it TRL 10?

So TRL 1 means you've been in the lab and you've observed a phenomena and you think

it could be useful.

TRL 10 means this is a process running at full scale in industry.

At least from an industrial perspective of course for aerospace it's a little bit different,

the definitions.

But essentially it goes from 1 to 10.

And usually also when you want to have investments and things like that you also need to talk

about to investors about what TRL you're at.