The big progress with new technologies that reduce, if not avoid, harmful emissions will remain the domain of developed industrial regions for quite a while, according to participants at the Eurocoke Summit 2022 in Düsseldorf.

Speakers at discussion panels noted that mainly wealthy regions like Europe, the US, or South Korea can afford to be the vanguard on the road to decarbonisation. In the view of Hans-Bodo Lüngen, retired managing director of Germany’s Iron and Steel Institute, VDEh, no other region is pushing the green transition as strictly as the European Union.

“At steel industries elsewhere, the thinking is more, let me call it incremental,” he said.

The conference especially had an eye on India and its totally different ambitions of virtually doubling its steelmaking capacity by the 2030s, as presented by Chris Urzaa by Jellinbah Group. Environmental restrictions will hardly be a limiting factor for the expansion plans because it creates jobs, Kallanish heard Urzaa say.

“When you talk to steelmakers there, they are just very convinced they serve the good of their country” when boosting production, he said. How these ambitions go together with limited availability of raw materials remains to be seen, he warned. He believes that the balance might work only if Chinese demand decreases correspondingly.

Meanwhile, in Europe, “we are flooded with press releases claiming that by 2030 some steelmaker will be producing X million tonnes of green steel – but is it realistic?” Ranjana von Wendland of Dow Jones wondered.