Published by: Alesha Alkaff<>
27 Feb 2025 @ 23:27 UTC

The US International Trade Commission’s (USITC) released findings from its investigation assessing the intensity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from steel and aluminium produced in the country on Thursday February 27.

The investigation, first launched in July 2023, was received by the steel industry amid consensus on the importance of data collection in developing trade policy, sources told Fastmarkets at the time.
The analysis was requested by the US Trade Representative (USTR) to inform negotiations on the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum (GASSA), which sought to address emissions intensities and global nonmarket excess capacity in these sectors.
The Commission consulted various steel and aluminium companies, including Steel Dynamics, Nucor, and the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), who testified at a hearing in Washington in December 2023 attended by Fastmarkets.
AISI was pleased to work with the USITC to provide guidance for this study on behalf of the American steel industry. The product-specific data set forth in this report will be extremely useful as policymakers evaluate trade policy measures that take into account the GHG emissions intensity of imported versus domestic steel products, Kevin Dempsey, president and chief executive officer of the AISI, told Fastmarkets on Thursday.
Dempsey added: American steel producers are dedicated to continuing to lead the world in producing steel with the lowest GHG emissions intensity. Of the major steel-producing countries, the US has the lowest [carbon dioxide] emissions per ton of steel produced.
Steel mill products In its findings, the ITC revealed that average emissions intensities among carbon and alloy steel mill products ranged between 0.67 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per tonne of steel (tCO2e/t steel) for hot-worked long products and 2.17 tCO2e/t steel for coated flat products.
The average emissions intensity used by the ITC is a production-weighted national average of the associated emissions and production tonnages reported by all the respondents of the ITC’s questionnaire.
For stainless steel mill products, the average emissions of the products ranged between 2.31 tCO2e/t steel for hot-rolled flat and 4.55 tCO2e/t steel for wire.
Further downstream steel products generally had higher emissions intensities than less-processed steel products because the subsequent process in steel production involves more steps and therefore more opportunities for emissions, the report said.
For carbon and alloy steel mill products, the most emissions-intensive processes in the domestic steel industry occur during the upstream production of pig iron and semifinished steel. The further subprocesses to produce downstream products lead to significant differences in emissions intensities across the product categories.
Meanwhile, stainless steel mill products have higher emissions intensities compared with carbon and alloy steel, due to the larger use of energy and ferroalloys associated with stainless steel production, the report explained.
Emissions are divided into three scopes: those directly produced by company (Scope 1), those indirectly generated from electricity or steam energy (Scope 2) and those from upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain (Scope 3). Scope 3 emissions have long been the most difficult to quantify, since they are usually emitted by third parties.