Steel and CCS/U

Decarbonisation potential, costs, and bottlenecks

Carbon capture, storage and/or utilisation (CCS/U) technologies are often touted as a ‘catch all’ solution for the decarbonisation of heavy industry, but their effectiveness and relevance vary widely across applications. This new report offers a comprehensive assessment of CCS/U technologies in the context of iron and steel manufacturing in Europe.

To evaluate their performance, the report examines the costs, effectiveness, and electricity needs of specific CCS/U technologies used to cut down emissions from iron and steelmaking.

Key Takeaways

All CCS/U applications perform worse in terms of achieving emissions reductions than other available solutions – such as green H2-DRI-EAF, or EAFs using recycled post-consumer scrap.

The only CCS/U applications that may be relevant in this sector are CCS projects for DRI plants.

Download the report

July 2024

Also important to note: CCS/U technologies do not solve the emissions originating from coal mining, nor other upstream emissions from coking, sintering, lime production, etc.

While coupling iron and steel production with carbon capture solutions obviously leads to reduced carbon emissions compared to simply keeping the old facilities running, reliance on CCS/U technologies in the iron and steel sector does not make sense economically, environmentally, and energy-speaking.

Concerns about CCS/U expressed in this report also extend to the increasing number of EU policies and EU funding supporting the deployment of these technologies, irrespective of their sectoral relevance. Other climate mitigation technologies may be underfunded as a result. It is important that the EU’s ambition to create a market for CO2 does not come at the expense of the main objective of reducing carbon emissions. CCS/U technologies must only be deployed where they make sense.

We hope this report will help bring clarity in the current debate around the use of carbon capture technologies to reduce European industrial emissions. It is time for increasing ambition, not false solutions.