Defining Green Steel

The definition of green steel (or any other related terminology) is a prerequisite for developing a coherent policy for decarbonising the sector and creating demand for products with green attributes. Globally, there is no commonly accepted definition of green steel yet, though multiple organisations and various countries are working on it.

India is committed to decarbonise the steel sector in alignment with net-zero emission intensity target by 2070.To mark this, as a historic milestone in India’s journey towards low-emission steel, ​the taxonomy of Green Steel​ was unveiled for India. Globally, there is no commonly accepted definition of green steel; India is the first nation to release the Taxonomy of Green Steel.

There are multiple challenges to defining green steel in the Indian context. The cost of producing ‘fossil-free’ and ‘near-zero emissions’ steel is prohibitively high today. Further, the disparity in the availability of resources like natural gas, scrap, etc. and different milestone years across countries for achieving net zero emissions will be key challenges for developing a globally accepted definition of green steel. Within India, developing a just and fair definition that will incentivise incremental decarbonisation across various production pathways and creating an ecosystem equipped with monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), green steel certification and registry would be critical to ensure cost-effective decarbonisation of the sector.

Given this background, there are a few design considerations that can be used to define green steel in the
Indian context. These considerations, listed in Figure ES2, are an outcome of definitions proposed globally and focus on various aspects related to defining green-steel. Based on globally proposed definitions, a key deliberation would be to have scrap-agnostic or scrap-centric targets on the emission intensity of steel that can be further used to estimate the amount of green steel. Further, given the heterogeneity of India’s steel industry, the emissions intensity targets could either be production route agnostic or production route specific. The targets on the emission intensity of steel could also be one single value or multiple bands of emissions intensity can be considered for categorising steel based on emissions intensity. The future targets on emissions intensity of steel could either be dynamic, implying that it can be changed in the future based on the progress achieved, or it can be a static value where, irrespective of the progress made by the sector, the targets for future years will not be changed.