you’ll have to mix carbon and iron at very high temperatures. And this process is energy-intensive. It also produces emissions. A lot of emissions. In fact, for every tonne of steel, we release close to 1.85 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
2nd largest producer of steel in the world?
India!!!
in 2020, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) sounded a grim warning. It noted that CO2 emissions from steel production were likely to soar 3.5 times in the next 30 years
while steel contributes around 8% to global emissions, India’s steelmakers contributed nearly 12% of the country’s emissions
Why does India’s steel industry emit so much CO2 in the first place?”
Well, some of it is down to the production process. About 45% of all steel is still made using something called a Blast Furnace-Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF). In it, the carbon in coking coal combines with oxygen to form Carbon dioxide
We could use an Electric arc furnace or even an induction furnace. These methods use electric currents in the melting process and you can get new steel from scrap steel (instead of using dirty lumps of coal). And this alone reduces CO2 emissions by nearly 60–80%
India has a problem — a shortage of scrap steel. As per government data, in 2017 the deficit was to the tune of 7 million tonnes. And so the EAF and IF plants end up using more iron ore than scrap steel when compared to other countrie
India has $184 billion worth of BOF plants under development and each furnace can last 20–40 years. Now since it costs a bomb to set up these furnaces in the first place, it’s quite unlikely that companies will be willing to let it all die by the wayside and shift to cleaner alternatives.
