While COP26 in Glasgow achieved meaningful progress, there is still a large gap between the announced governmental climate pledges and actions required to limit global warming to no more than 1.5°C. Given the enormous amount of coal-based blast furnace capacities that reach the end of their campaign life before 2030, the global steel sector offers an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to an accelerated transformation and deep emission cuts before 2030, but also a risk for carbon lock-in and stranded assets if it continues to reinvest in long-lived coal-based assets. A rapidly growing project pipeline of commercial-scale low-carbon steel plants shows that the key technologies for the steel transformation are available, but different countries are facing different challenges and opportunities in the global steel transformation.
During this event that was organised by Agora Industry, the new sub-brand of Agora Energiewende launched in October 2021, panelists from think tanks and research institutions from Australia, Korea, Japan, Sweden and South Africa gave snapshots of the state of play of the steel transformation in their countries.
As an input for the panel discussion, Helen Burmeister, Project Officer Climate-Neutral Industry at Agora Industry, presented the key findings of a joint paper by Agora Industry, Wuppertal Institute and Lund University entitled “Global Steel at a Crossroads”. This was followed by a panel discussion with international perspectives on the global steel transformation.