Environment › Climate negotiations and finance
Mitigation: industry, methane and carbon removal
Cutting emissions where it is hardest and taking carbon back out of the air: steel, cement and other heavy industry, methane and cooling gases, shipping and aviation, and carbon capture, removal and geoengineering. It serves GS3 answers on climate change and industry.
8 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Carbon lock-in
A steel plant is not a decision taken again each year: it is taken once, when the plant is built or relined, and carbon lock-in is the name for what follows.
- It cannot be revisited cheaply for the decades the plant then runs.
- Relining a blast furnace, the periodic rebuild of its inner lining, adds another fifteen to twenty years of working life and so another fifteen to twenty years of emissions.
- The cheapest mitigation in these sectors is therefore the plant not built and the rebuild not done.
- A study in Nature Climate Change found that not building new coal based blast furnaces, and not relining young ones, could almost halve the world's committed steel emissions.
8 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Steelmaking routes
Which route a new plant takes is what gets locked in, because one burns coking coal by design and the other need not.
Blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF)
- Blast furnace: coking coal strips oxygen from iron ore
- Basic oxygen furnace: pure oxygen refines the carbon rich iron
- 70.4% of global steelmaking
Electric arc furnace
- Melts scrap or direct reduced iron (DRI) with electricity
- Less than half the emissions intensity
- DRI made with green hydrogen and clean power: close to zero
- India has little old steel to recycle, so DRI in electric arc furnaces, not scrap, is its best option
8 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
India's steel emissions
BF-BOF43%
Induction furnaces35%
Electric arc furnaces22%
- India's steel emissions run about 32 per cent above the global average.
- Steel is nearly 12 per cent of India's greenhouse gas emissions, which is why it is the test case for mitigation policy.
- More than 43 million tonnes a year of Indian capacity falls due for relining before 2030.
- India's BF-BOF share is projected to reach 56 per cent by 2030, though most of those plants have not broken ground.