How Steel Technologies Help the Steel Industry Meet Sustainability Goals

Steel Technologies is a flat-rolled steel processor dedicated to meeting the precise specifications of industrial customers. Their corporate office can be found across three separate buildings in Louisville; their processing plants are located in Eminence and Peru and at other sites, while they maintain a nationwide sales team.

When discussing sustainability, the steel industry may not immediately come to mind, but they are taking steps to increase their eco-credentials. Some key areas include:

Digitalization

Digitalization is an integral component of the steel industry’s transition toward sustainability, helping companies improve production processes while using less energy. Digital technologies include advanced data analysis, automation of production processes, and interconnection of value chains; furthermore, it allows businesses to experiment with new business models while creating more customer-centric experiences and helping meet environmental targets such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions or water consumption.

Digitalization in the steel industry involves significant investments and changes to existing systems but can provide immense potential for increased efficiency and adaptability of steel production processes. Digitalizing a plant may reduce delivery times while meeting changing customer demands more rapidly, and secure data storage and sharing provide reliable means of supporting production process efficiency.

Digitalization’s most significant advantage in the steel industry lies in its ability to increase process flexibility, reduce energy usage, and boost product quality. Furthermore, digitalization can make steel production more sustainable by limiting waste and emissions and making monitoring the environmental performance of individual production units more straightforward.

Steel manufacturers can take advantage of digitalization by connecting their production systems using machine-to-machine communications, then analyzing and refining these systems to optimize overall process performance, thus helping mitigate price volatility and supply chain disruption issues. Furthermore, digitalization allows steel companies to provide customers with information regarding costs for products and services more seamlessly than before.

Digitalized steel plants can take advantage of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), which can reduce operational costs, boost productivity, and enhance safety measures for employees and customers.

Steelmakers of the future will use Internet of Things (IoT) technology to connect their plants. This connectivity will allow them to monitor and control operations from any location worldwide, create virtual models of factories to predict problems before they happen, and create virtual models of manufacturing facilities – innovations that will keep steel industries competitive in global economies.

Gas cleaning

Steelmakers use gas cleaning as a method for purifying liquid iron. Limestone and coke react with it, creating a solid mass called slag that floats on top of metallic pools before being collected for disposal. Steelmakers can use gas cleaning in their blast furnace, EAF, or continuous cast plant.

EAFs have become the go-to technology for secondary steel production from recycled scrap while also playing an essential role in primary production by upgrading or refining DRI sponge iron. EAFs rely mainly on electricity power sources for powering their production process, thus having smaller carbon footprints than integrated mills’ traditional blast furnaces and basic oxygen steelmaking processes.

Cold-rolled steel with a lower carbon content than other varieties and produced by passing an ingot/slab through pairs of rolls to make thinner products with more excellent formability and strength. It is typically used in automotive body panels and other applications that require deep drawing.

Finishing operations are the final stage in steelmaking, converting semi-finished slabs or billets to finished products ready for customer use. Finishing operations may utilize rolling mills, pickle lines, tandem mills, annealing facilities, and temper mills for this step.

AISI is the industry association representing North American integrated and electric arc furnace steelmakers. Representing its views in public policy debates, it advocates for steel as an essential global material.

As emerging technologies become economically feasible, the steel industry is poised to make significant strides toward emissions-free production. Direct reduction technologies utilizing natural gas could allow US steelmakers to forego costly fossil fuels in favor of renewable-powered hydrogen energy sources. By receiving federal policy support through a hydrogen tax credit, these technologies can achieve cost parity within the US market. This could involve shifting production locations to regions combining iron ore availability with high renewable capacity factors and accelerating the creation of a lower-carbon steel supply base in the United States, benefitting communities and workers while remaining competitive against less traditional production bases emerging across Europe and Asia.

Resource-efficient manufacturing

Resource-efficient manufacturing refers to the environmentally sustainable production of goods. It decreases environmental impacts during all stages of development of the product and service life cycle while simultaneously decreasing waste generation and conserving natural resources. Resource-efficient manufacturing is integral for the future of the manufacturing industry as global manufacturers face rising environmental damage as non-renewable resources become scarcer – adopting resource-efficient processes must remain key if the sector wants to stay competitive and relevant in this globalized era.

Steelmaking is an energy-intensive industry and uses vast amounts of heat. While not top of mind when considering energy efficiency and sustainability, steelmakers are taking steps to become more eco-friendly – one such step being investing in more brilliant production plants that utilize sensor technology, digital production planning tools, machine learning algorithms, and machine learning to monitor each component and optimize operation for maximum productivity.

The steel industry generates considerable scrap, typically recycled and reused to form new products. This practice has significant environmental benefits as it reduces the need to extract raw materials and helps mitigate emissions. However, due to varying quality among scrap, careful consideration must be given when sorting it for recycling; otherwise, the final product won’t meet the required standards.

Renewable energies offer another method for mitigating the environmental impacts associated with steel production, including biomass, zero-carbon electricity, and CCS retrofits. While none of these technologies is 100% effective at mitigating greenhouse gases from existing steel plants, all are costly and difficult to implement.

The International Energy Agency’s new report, “Cooling Iron and Steel for a Sustainable Future,” examines vital technologies and strategies that could enable significant CO2 reductions within the iron and steel sector. Furthermore, this study investigates its current business model and provides a roadmap for its transformation toward more eco-friendly practices.

Sustainability

Steel is an indispensable material in manufacturing industries worldwide and an international commodity trade market. However, its production contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions – leading companies such as Volkswagen and Toyota to push for carbon-free steel across their value chains and an industry response with cutting-edge technologies.

Steel is one of the world’s most recyclable materials. Much new steel production comes from recycled scrap materials like old cars, refrigerators, and decommissioned bridges that are melted back into supply chains without losing quality; this reduces mining requirements as well as CO2 emissions; this process could eventually move towards zero emissions production in time.

The iron and steel industry currently accounts for around 6% of global CO2 emissions. Although heavy and energy intensive, there are ways of mitigating its environmental footprint by increasing recycling efforts, improving industry efficiencies, or adopting cutting-edge technologies that enable lower emission production methods.

Kobe Steel, an iron ore company, is developing technology designed to reduce carbon intensity by up to 20 percent in its products. This solution uses electricity to separate oxygen from iron ore, creating O2 as an end-product instead of CO2. Kobe is developing this innovation alongside Boston Metal and is expected to make it commercially available by 2025.

While this measure could reduce emissions significantly, it doesn’t completely solve the iron and steel industry’s overall carbon footprint. Furthermore, it may prove costly and energy-intensive; thus, enabling green steel as an industry goal would require finding cost-competitive ways of using renewable energy resources like wind or solar.

Decarbonization innovations such as zero-carbon electricity and biomass sources are also being explored; however, these are in their initial stages and unlikely to rival conventional blast furnace technologies before reaching commercial scale.