Yuriy Ryzhenkov, the general director of Metinvest Mining and Metallurgical Group, says that Ukrainian metallurgy has a competitive advantage in the framework of the green metallurgy project and that this is a chance for Ukraine to correctly integrate its own economy into the EU economy.

"Green" metallurgy always has two sides. One is precisely metallurgy. This is what we said about Mariupol, where it is possible to build a new electrometallurgical plant, replace blast furnaces and converters with electrometallurgy. Today we understand that this idea is simply not relevant, that we will consider topics on metallurgy in Mariupol after the city is liberated from the invaders," the company's top manager said in an interview with the FAQ Talks project.

According to him, the second part of the topic of "green" metallurgy is the raw materials that need to be prepared. Here Metinvest has a competitive advantage, because the iron ore reserves that the company produces can be enriched to a sufficiently high iron content. This raw material can be turned into a semi-product that will be used by electrometallurgical enterprises in Ukraine or Europe.

Ryzhenkov stressed that this is important for Europe, because there are not enough such semi-finished products. "Green" metallurgy is a chance for Ukraine to correctly integrate its own economy into the EU economy, Ukraine can become the first part of the chain of "green" metallurgy.

In the future, production in Ukraine can be converted to the use of hydrogen and produce a generally carbon-free part of metallurgy. This project is currently in the active phase at Metinvest. At the same time, the company does not build new units yet, but invests in design work for these units, modernizes production for this technology.