ArcelorMittal Europe Sets Out Path to Net Zero by 2050
ArcelorMittal Europe has announced details of how it plans to become carbon neutral by 2050 in its first climate action report, published today. Building on the company’s work that has demonstrated that the steelmaking process can become carbon neutral, the report publishes details of the ground-breaking work underway to reduce emissions by 30% by 2030 before reaching net zero in 2050. The company is pioneering two breakthrough carbon-neutral routes for steelmaking: Smart Carbon, and an innovative DRI-based route. Smart Carbon is a carbon-neutral steelmaking route that leverages all clean energies circular carbon, clean electricity and carbon capture and storage within the high temperature-controlled reduction environment of ironmaking. In its first phase, Smart Carbon will primarily use circular carbon. Reaching carbon-neutral steelmaking via DRI involves moving from using predominantly natural gas, to hydrogen as the key reductant in ironmaking. As this hydrogen becomes green’, the steelmaking process comes close to carbon neutrality.
While both the Smart Carbon route and the DRI-based route have the potential to deliver carbon -neutral steel by 2050, the important difference between the two routes is that Smart Carbon can deliver results sooner, through its use of complementary technologies which enable incremental progress. Uniquely, Smart Carbon has the potential not only to provide carbon-neutral steel, but also carbon-neutral cement, and the building blocks to make recycled carbon materials to replace polyethylene-based plastics. Smart Carbon can also contribute to CO2 removal, through the increased use of circular carbon, using sustainable biomass and waste, combined with scaling up CCS.
By investing in both routes and in recognition of the need to act now to combat climate change - this means ArcelorMittal Europe can significantly reduce scope 1 CO2 emissions, which include all process emissions, by 2030 over a 2018 baseline, while waiting for the large-scale, affordable renewable energy needed for hydrogen-based steelmaking. ArcelorMittal Europe’s 2030 target therefore combines Smart Carbon technologies and increased scrap usage, specifically by developing new ways to increase the use of low-quality scrap metal, which is hard to recycle, in the primary steel production process.
In the longer-term, both routes have the potential to leverage all three clean energies to achieve carbon neutrality, namely:
Clean electricity (generated by sources such as solar and wind),
Circular carbon (making use of biowaste materials, such as sustainable forestry and agriculture residues, to produce bioenergy)
Carbon capture and storage (capturing CO2 before it is emitted, transporting it and storing it safely underground).
Source : Strategic Research Institute