Perspective Chapter: Forging the Future – An Economic and Geographical Odyssey of World Steel Production and Its Path Ahead

Abstract

Steel manufacture is a carbon and energy intensive process that, globally, on average, emits 1.9 tonnes of carbon-dioxide (CO2) and uses 5.17 MWh of primary energy per ton produced, accounting for 9% of 11 human CO2 emissions. The structure of the world’s steel production must fundamentally change if the Paris Agreement’s objectives of keeping global temperature increase below 1.5°C from preindustrial levels are to be met. There are a number of technological avenues leading to a lower carbon intensity for steelmaking, which bring with them a paradigm shifts decoupling CO2 emissions from crude steel production by moving away from traditional methods of steel production using fossil coal and fossil methane and toward those based on reasonably priced renewable electricity and green hydrogen. The effects of fully defossilized steelmaking have not yet been thoroughly studied with regard to the energy system. A Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—based demand model for global steel demands, which forecasts an increase in steel demand from 1.6 Gt in 2020 to 2.4 Gt in 2100, is used in this study to investigate the energy system requirements of a global defossilized power-to-steel sector.