Steel and concrete are climate change's hard problem. Can we solve it?

Heavy industry produces more carbon dioxide than the entire US. Perfect the new technologies that could clean it up and we can score a crucial climate victory

steel making

With temperatures reaching 1300 °C, making steel is a hot and dirty business

Wolfram Schroll/Industriefotograf

“DANGER. No unauthorized entry. Hot rolling in progress.” If anything, the sign beneath the dirty hunk of industrial machinery underplays things. When the 11-tonne slab of metal I’ve been watching emerges from the furnace, heated to 1300°C, it glows incandescent white. Then it zips along a conveyor belt, hissing and steaming as it is cooled by water jets, before a line of rolling cylinders press it into the final product: a sheet of gleaming steel.

For all that we live in the digital age, we still rely on hot and dirty processes like this to construct our cities, homes and vehicles. Walking around the steelworks in Newport, UK, I get a sense of the immense energy required – and this is only the stage at which the steel is worked. Making it from raw iron ore is even more intensive. In fact, the production of steel and that other construction staple, concrete, accounts for as much as 16 per cent of humanity’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. That is equivalent to the carbon footprint of the US.

In the fight against climate change, heavy industries are the final frontier. Decarbonising transport and energy is the easy part. Steel and concrete are different beasts. It is much harder to produce them without releasing enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And yet if we want to reach net-zero carbon targets, we can no longer ignore them.

Cleaning up concrete and steel is such an immense challenge that it can …


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