Columbia Business School’s Climate Knowledge Initiative provides business leaders with the curated, actionable knowledge needed to pick investable and scalable green technologies, while unapologetically flagging areas where business and public interests diverge. Here you will find executive briefs, business case studies, PowerPoints, PDFs and more to share, adapt, and use to chart a high-efficiency, low-carbon path.
During a recent workshop at Columbia Business School, experts addressed the challenge of soaring emissions, highlighting the urgent need for a comprehensive transformation across the industry.
It is both technically possible and economically feasible to eliminate almost all the carbon dioxide from iron and steel production by mid-century, thus cleaning up an industry that accounts for 10 percent of global emissions. But progress will not happen without a concerted policy push.
Iron ore + coal = iron + carbon dioxide. This chemical reaction, known long before the invention of the periodic table, is a key part of the steelmaking process and has helped build the modern world. But every tonne of iron generates more than two tonnes of CO₂, giving the iron and steel sector outsize importance in addressing climate change: it is responsible for one-tenth of global annual greenhouse gas emissions.
How does a steel production plant become fully decarbonized? In February 2021, Dr. Maria Persson Gulda joined Harald Mix and Carl-Erik Lagercrantz to build the world’s first full-size, zero-carbon steel plant using green hydrogen, a venture that would be potentially the biggest transformation in the centuries-old steel industry has seen.
Voestalpine, the Austria-based global leading steel manufacturing division of High Performance Metals, has made a bold commitment. It would achieve climate neutrality by 2050, with chief sustainability officer Philipp Horner leading the charge. Horner and his strategy team must review its entire manufacturing process to find opportunities for decarbonization, including learning about completely new methods for production and reevaluating its existing blast furnace technology.
Electra Steel is Sandeep Nijhawan’s brainchild to decarbonize the process of making steel by creating green iron ore.The incumbent steel industry is a big offender when it comes to greenhouse gases, emitting about 2 tonnes of CO2 produced for every tonne of steel, and a major part of emissions-producing steel production hinges on the processing of iron, so Electra’s strategy is to address this part.