Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Department of Geography, King's College London, London, UK.
Nature. 2023 Oct;622(7983):514-520. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06486-7. Epub 2023 Sep 20.
The highly energy-intensive iron and steel industry contributed about 25% (ref. ) of global industrial CO emissions in 2019 and is therefore critical for climate-change mitigation. Despite discussions of decarbonization potentials at national and global levels, plant-specific mitigation potentials and technologically driven pathways remain unclear, which cumulatively determines the progress of net-zero transition of the global iron and steel sector. Here we develop a CO emissions inventory of 4,883 individual iron and steel plants along with their technical characteristics, including processing routes and operating details (status, age, operation-years etc.). We identify and match appropriate emission-removal or zero-emission technologies to specific possessing routes, or what we define thereafter as a techno-specific decarbonization road map for every plant. We find that 57% of global plants have 8-24 operational years, which is the retrofitting window for low-carbon technologies. Low-carbon retrofitting following the operational characteristics of plants is key for limiting warming to 2 °C, whereas advanced retrofitting may help limit warming to 1.5 °C. If each plant were retrofitted 5 years earlier than the planned retrofitting schedule, this could lead to cumulative global emissions reductions of 69.6 (±52%) gigatonnes (Gt) CO from 2020 to 2050, almost double that of global CO emissions in 2021. Our results provide a detailed picture of CO emission patterns associated with production processing of iron and steel plants, illustrating the decarbonization pathway to the net-zero-emissions target with the efforts from each plant.
高能耗的钢铁行业在 2019 年贡献了全球工业 CO2排放量的约 25%（参考文献），因此对于减缓气候变化至关重要。尽管在国家和全球层面上讨论了脱碳潜力，但工厂特定的减排潜力和技术驱动的途径仍不清楚，这共同决定了全球钢铁行业净零转型的进展。在这里，我们开发了一个包含 4883 家钢铁厂及其技术特征的 CO2排放清单，包括加工路线和操作细节（状态、年龄、运行年限等）。我们确定并匹配适当的减排或零排放技术到特定的拥有路线，或者我们随后将其定义为每个工厂的特定技术脱碳路线图。我们发现，全球 57%的工厂拥有 8-24 年的运营年限，这是低碳技术的改造窗口。根据工厂的运行特点进行低碳改造是将升温限制在 2°C 的关键，而先进的改造可能有助于将升温限制在 1.5°C。如果每个工厂都比计划的改造时间表提前 5 年进行改造，这可能会导致 2020 年至 2050 年期间全球累计减排 69.6（±52%）亿吨 CO2，几乎是 2021 年全球 CO2排放量的两倍。我们的研究结果提供了与钢铁厂生产加工相关的 CO2排放模式的详细图片，说明了实现净零排放目标的脱碳途径，每个工厂都为此做出了努力。
