Decarbonizing the Steel Industry

Today we’re exploring the most used, and most important, engineering material in the world: steel. It’s necessary for laboratories, all modes of transportation, roads, bridges, housing, shipping, and musical instruments. It’s also used in abundance in your household, like for saucepans, fridges and furniture, and in surgical instruments. It seems even more unavoidable than plastics. And that’s not a bad thing.

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Steel is infinitely recyclable with no downgrading in quality, so once manufactured it’s life is potentially limitless. Even scrap from the smelting is fed back into the system for use. Due to being magnetic, it’s extremely easy to separate from other recycling/trash. And recycling steel uses 64 percent less energy, 73 percent less GHGs, and 90 percent less iron ore than when processing virgin steel. There is more demand than supply for recycled steel, which maintains the value of this commodity - something which can’t be said for most other recycled materials. The rates for steel recycling are pleasingly high. In 2018, ferrous scrap in cars was recycled at 106 percent; structural steel was 98 percent; appliances had a 90 percent rate; reinforcement steel was recycled 70 percent of the time, and steel cans had a recycling rate of 66.8 percent.

Let’s take a quick look at what steel actually is. You might immediately think of it as a metal. But in fact it’s an alloy—a composite material from different types of metals— iron being the major component, then carbon, manganese, nickel, chromium, silicon, and cobalt. The exact recipe used will determine the characteristics of the resultant steel and hence the function of it. Those characteristics which can be manipulated are the melting point, density, hardness, strength, flexibility, and tensile strength.
Steel really is a necessity in our lives, functionally but also economically. The industry employs millions of people worldwide, has an annual turnover of 2.5 trillion dollars, and produces over 1.3 billion tons of the stuff every year. Thanks to developments in materials science, we need less to create the same products than ever before—if the Eiffel Tower were built today, it would require 75 percent less steel. While we’re looking for alternatives to cement and plastic, due not only to the raw ingredients and large carbon footprint of production, but largely to the end-of-life difficulties with these materials, luckily we don’t need to find a replacement for steel. But what we do need to address is the manufacturing process. Because as it stands, outside of power generation, the iron and steel sector is the largest industrial producer of GHGs. A whopping 7-9 percent of global direct fossil fuel emissions are from this industry—more than the total emissions from India. This is particularly relevant because India is currently the world’s second largest steel manufacturer, and plans to be the leader with 20 percent of the world’s production by 2050.