Steel Market 01 / 2020

Industry & Technology
Worldwide
Making steel in the 2020s
Guest article by Edwin Basson
As we enter not just a new year but a new decade, the steel industry continues to face its traditional
challenges - overcapacity, restructuring and trade frictions to name just a few. In addition,
a number of other pressures will become increasingly significant. Edwin Basson, Director General
of global steel association worldsteel takes a look at issues that will caracterise the decade.
Our customers and society at
large are demanding greater
transparency and accountability
in all aspects of our work, especially
with respect to safety, environmental
and labour standards.
The tragedy at the Brumadinho
iron ore mine in the early part of last
year highlights the importance of this
work to the steel industry in particular.
Responding to pressure from their
own customers, the construction, automotive
and other sectors want to
know more and more about how our
products are made and where and
how we source our raw materials.
Swedish climate activist
Greta Thunberg attending
Fridays For Future (School
Strike for Climate) protest
in front of a huge crowd near
the Colosseum in Rome.
Copyright: Shutterstock
Supply chain management and
reporting will become a critical
part of our industry’s licence to
operate.
Indeed, we may see our raw material
suppliers wanting to work with us
more closely than ever before to show
their stakeholders that we are using
their products responsibly.
worldsteel’s Sustainability Reporting
Expert Group has developed a
matrix for our 30 most important material
inputs and their associated sustainability
risks depending on where
they are sourced from.
In the new year we will be widening
the scope of our work on steel
scrap, something that will become
increasingly important this decade as
the availability of scrap increases and
we see a higher percentage of global
crude steel produced by recycling
scrap in electric arc furnaces.
The activism of Greta Thunberg,
Extinction Rebellion and others
has heightened public awareness
of climate change.
Having worked with worldsteel for
some time now, the International
Energy Agency (IEA) will this year publish
its technology roadmap for the
steel industry, which will set out a strategy
for decoupling increases in steel
production from related CO 2
emissions.
We as an energy intensive sector with
hard-to-abate CO 2
emissions will have
to clearly explain why decarbonising
the global economy will be a steel-intensive
process.
It will partly depend on our 100%
and infinitely recyclable material. We
will also have to communicate the capital-intensive
and technically demanding
work our members are doing in
developing breakthrough technologies
that will see virgin steel produced with
net zero carbon. This includes technologies
that reduce iron ore with renew-
ably-produced hydrogen and which
thus reduce the need for coking coal.
Although such technologies will
likely not be commercially viable in
the next decade, worldsteel, through
its step up programme, will in the
meantime work with its members to
drive short and medium-term process
efficiency gains in raw material quality,
energy efficiency, process yield
and process reliability, all of which
will reduce the industry’s impact on
the climate. Our industry is already
making headway in responding to
these new pressures, but there remains
much to do. Fortunately, both
the steel industry and steel as a product
already play an important role in
driving the sustainability that society
expects.
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26 01 | 2020