Award-winning U.S company that is beating its reduced greenhouse gas emissions target has won recognition from the Department of Energy in its Better Climate Challenge
Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs’ success in beating its goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions from its U.S. iron and steel operations won recognition from the Department of Energy last month.
Cliffs slashed greenhouse gas emissions for more than 40 U.S. facilities by nearly one-third from a 2017 baseline as of the end of last year. As a result, the Department of Energy named the company a 2023 Goal Achiever in the agency’s Better Climate Challenge.
The steel industry was responsible for about 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions as of 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported last year.
The achievement and ongoing decarbonization efforts by Cliffs and other companies stand out because the steel industry has been seen as a hard-to-decarbonize sector, due to its need for high heat and continuous operations, as well as process reactions that emit more carbon dioxide.
At the same time, the energy transition and growth of renewable energy will likely increase demand for steel, and global demand for low-carbon steel should grow as well, according to a McKinsey & Company analysis released earlier this year. Companies in the steel industry also see a need to curb emissions in order to limit the worst impacts of climate change.
“We do know that we play a role in global warming,” said Traci Forrester, executive vice president for environmental and sustainability matters at Cliffs, speaking to Energy News Network.
Added incentives come from the prospect of possible government regulation of carbon emissions in order to address climate change, as noted in the company’s 2022 annual report to shareholders, released this past April.
Customer demands also play a role. “At U.S. Steel, it’s not just about reducing our own carbon footprint,” said Arista Joyner, who manages financial and sustainability communications for that company. “We must adapt to the changing needs of our customers and their sustainability goals too.”
The traditional method of making steel mixes iron ore in a blast furnace with a high-carbon form of coal, called coke. The carbon combines with oxygen in the ore to form carbon dioxide. The iron melts. Other leftover waste takes the form of slag.
The iron — called “pig iron” at this stage — is then sent to a second furnace that blows in oxygen to make steel from the iron and some other elements. That also releases greenhouse gas emissions.
Together, the two steps account for around three-quarters of the U.S. iron and steel industry’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to RMI, a nonprofit whose work focuses on decarbonization.
Much of Cliffs’ progress on emissions is thanks to the 2020 opening of its “direct reduction” plant in Toledo. The facility starts with pelletized iron ore, which comes primarily from Minnesota, where a preliminary baking process has already removed some impurities.
Direct reduction removes oxygen from the ore with reformed methane, which is basically a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Both the hydrogen atoms and the carbon monoxide molecules can combine chemically with the oxygen. So, direct reduction is a lower-carbon way to process the ore pellets.
The Toledo plant has not eliminated the company’s use of blast furnaces. But hot briquetted iron can reduce the amount of coke needed if its next stop is a blast furnace, Forrester said. Transporting the briquettes while they’re hot also cuts down on fuel needs there or for the oxygen process furnace.
Hot briquetted iron can also go into an electric arc furnace. The steel industry mainly uses those furnaces now to recycle scrap steel.
“The beauty of steel is that it’s infinitely recyclable,” Rich Freuhauf told Energy News Network. The senior vice president and chief strategy and sustainability officer for U.S. Steel spoke at a Reuters Industry Transition conference in September.
Recycling eliminates the need to repeat the carbon dioxide-releasing steps of refining iron ore. And, as the name implies, electric arc furnaces run on electricity. So they could use nuclear power or renewable energy with battery storage instead of fossil fuels.
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