Published by: Alesha Alkaff<>
27 Mar 2025 @ 19:25 UTC

Automotive producers can spearhead the decarbonization of the steel industry by increasing demand for near-zero-emissions steel and capitalizing on green steel technologies, Jon Gordon, deputy director of CALSTART’s green steel program, said during a webinar on Thursday March 27.

The webinar, hosted by the non-profit organization, which has a focus on the development of efficient transport solutions, featured panelists from green iron and steelmakers Boston Metal, Electra and Stegra.
The automotive sector is a large consumer of steel produced via primary steelmaking, which is a highly emissions-intensive process, Gordon said on Thursday. The US market has a 30:70 split of primary steel and secondary steel, which involves using recycled steel and has far lower emissions due to the use of electricity.
The US produces about 20 million tons per year of primary steel, he said.
To match that capacity, CALSTART estimates that it would take 8-12 green steel facilities, developing a need to ramp-up green steel production by aggregating demand, Gordon said.
Demand has such a massive effect on the investments that are made, Gordon said. When we make steel today, we release between 1.5 and 3 tons of [carbon dioxide] per ton of steel. To make green steel, we need to take the carbon dioxide [out].
The decarbonization of steel concerns the decarbonizing of iron, Holger Koehler, head of strategy with clean iron company Electra, said.
It’s not the electric-arc furnace [steelmaking process] that is novel, he said. It is really the direct use of iron with 100% hydrogen testing. It’s all about the iron-making, and that requires a partnership along the value chain that is absolutely critical.
Electra intended to operate a commercial-scale green steel facility in Sweden by 2030. This will produce high-purity iron plate from low-grade iron ore using renewable energy and electrochemical processes. The company has a pilot plant already operating in Boulder, in the US state of Colorado.
Michael Lovgren, head of commercial metallics of Stegra, and Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president of business development at Boston Metal, both highlighted the importance of collaboration and a robust supply chain in the development of the green steel market.
Stegra, previously H2 Green Steel, is building a large-scale green steel plant in Boden, Sweden, aiming for near-zero-emissions steel production using green hydrogen and renewable electricity, with operations scheduled to begin in 2027.
Meanwhile, Boston Metal will deploy its first demonstration plant relating to the scalability of molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) steel to achieve commercial production in 2026. MOE does not require coke production, iron ore sintering and pelletizing, blast furnace reduction or basic oxygen furnace refinement.
When it comes to accelerating the decarbonization of the steel industry, Lovgren noted the importance of collaborating with original equipment manufacturers to strengthen the supply chain, to create the demand for low carbon emissions steel.
Where we definitely see the most value from automotive and some of these other early adopting markets is just stability of demand, Rauwerdink said, showing that the demand for green steel and low carbon emission steel is real, that it can survive the headlines of the day. That will allow the steel industry to make the capital allocations needed to really drive this change.
Global decarbonization trajectory Globally, the panelists highlighted China and India as markets to target when it comes to decarbonization, due to the mix of electric-arc furnace (EAF) and blast furnace (BF) steel production in those countries.
The global steel industry produces nearly 1.9 billion tonnes per year of steel, according to the World Economic Forum, and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
If your goal is to decarbonize 1.9 billion tpy of steel, something like 1.1 [billion tpy] of that is in India and China. So that’s certainly our priorities, Rauwerdink said during the webinar. The majority of the world’s blast furnaces are in China. So that’s going to be a critical market.
India is… forecast to grow in terms of overall steel supply, he added. They’ll be putting assets into the ground that will have decades of life. That’s an important part of decarbonizing the future of steel.
The decarbonization trajectory of the Chinese and Indian steel markets were likely to be prolonged, Holgren said, due to the relatively newer cadre of blast furnaces in these countries.
Those fleets are relatively young, Holgren said. The Chinese and especially the Indian fleet are actually really young blast furnaces. So that will be a longer-term [objective].
As recently as September 2024, Tata Steel commissioned India’s largest blast furnace.
Focusing on Asia, Lovgren highlighted that Japan and South Korea were bright spots for green steel demand.
But again, he said, the fleet is younger, so the kind of demand from that perspective looks a bit different and it’s less mature.