Marcello Rossi writes in Mother Jones on the race to produce sustainable steel.
- Steel making is one of the largest sources of industrial emissions, accounting for 7 to 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions each year.
- Innovators are racing to produce carbon free cement and early results are looking promising.
- One such company is Boston Metals, which uses electricity to separate iron from ore in the steel making process, which they say eliminates the material’s carbon emissions.
- Producing carbon free steel is needed to reduce our environmental footprint and will best be achieved by empowering the private sector.
“Perhaps the biggest roadblock is China, where about 90 percent of steel production is achieved using blast furnaces. In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that the country aims to become carbon neutral by 2060. In a bid to reduce pollution from domestic steel mills, which account for roughly 15 percent of the nation’s overall carbon emissions, Beijing has also pledged to achieve peak steel emissions by 2030. Even so, 18 new blast-furnace projects were announced in China just in the first six months of 2021, according to the Helsinki-based research group Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
