Author: Ali Hasanbeigi, Ph.D.
(Update on April 7, 2022)
Iron and steel industry is one of the most energy intensive and largest contributing industries to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There are various values in the literature regarding the total CO2 emissions of the global steel industry some of which vague and unclear causing confusion among people who read and use these numbers.
In April 2022, Global Efficiency Intelligence published a report titled “Steel Climate Impact - An International Benchmarking of Energy and CO2 Intensities". In this study, we conducted a benchmarking analysis for energy and CO2 emissions intensity of the steel industry among the 15 major steel-producing countries. We also calculated separately the intensities associated with the electric arc furnace (EAF) and blast furnace–basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) production routes in each country.
These 15 major steel producing countries account for 87% of total world steel production, 92% of BF-BOF and 75% of EAF steel production. Therefore, we have a high coverage of global steel production in our study.
We used IEA’s world energy statistics 2020 energy use data to estimate total steel industry’s CO2 emissions in 2019 and the weighted average CO2 intensities of BF-BOF and EAF route from countries/region included in this study to estimate total global emissions for each steel production route.
The Global steel industry emitted around 3.6 gigaton of CO2 (Gt CO2) emissions in 2019.
Global BF-BOF steel production emitted around 3.1 Gt CO2 and EAF production emitted around 0.5 Gt CO2 in 2019.
The high CO2 intensities of EAFs in China and India because of their use of large share of pig iron or coal-based direct reduced iron (DRI) as feedstock instead of steel scrap in EAFs causes an increase in global EAF’s CO2 emissions.
Based on total steel industry emissions presented above and the global GHG emissions of 52 Gt CO2-e in 2019 (includes non-CO2 GHG emissions as well) reported in UN Emissions Gap Report 2020, the global steel industry accounts for around 7% of total global GHG emissions.
Based on the total steel industry emissions presented above and the global CO2 emissions of 33 Gt CO2 in 2019 reported by IEA, the global steel industry accounts for around 11% of total global CO2 emissions.
It is worth highlighting that only the annual GHG emissions of China and the U.S. are higher than annual GHG emissions of global steel industry.
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