Steel is the biggest industrial emitter of CO2 after cement. While decarbonizing cement remains challenging, progress can be achieved in the steelmaking sector, which accounts for around 7% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 11% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Steel sector emissions are primarily due to its reliance on coal, which meets 75% of the sector’s energy needs.
In coming decades, steel demand is expected to increase, especially in developing and emerging economies, driven in part by the construction, automotive, and manufacturing sectors. Steel will also play a key role in the energy transition to build infrastructure and products such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. This means that we will need to expand current steelmaking capacity by building new facilities. Meanwhile, many existing facilities are also nearing the end of their lifetime and will need to be refurbished by 2030. It means that crucial investment decisions are coming in the next decade and that the steel industry is at a crossroad between decarbonizing to align with the Paris Agreement targets or locking in GHG emissions for decades.
Climate science is clear on the need to decarbonize the steel sector rapidly if we are to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Though the steel sector has traditionally been dubbed as “hard to abate” by policy makers for many years due in part to the lack of viable alternative technologies, multiple analyses now show that thanks to recent technology advances, the steel sector can be almost fully decarbonized by 2050.
In this webinar, after a brief overview of how steel is currently produced, experts will walk us through the existing technology solutions to decarbonize it and to phase out metallurgical coal in line with the Paris Agreement. They will explain why crucial decisions to decarbonize the steel sector need to be taken in the 2020s.
