Environment and Disaster Management › Climate negotiations and finance
हिन्दी — Read in HindiMitigation: industry, methane and carbon removal
The emission cuts that are hardest to make: steel, cement and other industry, methane, refrigerant gases under the Kigali Amendment, and the capture and removal of carbon. It serves GS3 answers on climate change and industry.
Foundation note: Cutting what is hard to cut: hard to abate sectors, methane and carbon removal
Showing 2 of 3 articles, those that changed from 1 July to 30 September 2026.Show all
Steel: carbon lock in and the two routes
Copy link to Steel: carbon lock in and the two routesPrelims and Mains
Carbon lock in is what follows when a steel plant is built or relined: the decision is taken once, and it commits the plant's emissions for the years it runs.
- Steel is nearly 12 per cent of India's greenhouse gas emissions, and its steel emissions run about 32 per cent above the global average, which is why it is the test case for mitigation policy.
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
Why the decision locks in
- Relining a blast furnace adds fifteen to twenty years of working life, and so of emissions.
- Closing a plant early wastes the money sunk into it.
- Which route a new plant takes is what gets locked in.
The two routes
- The blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace route, 70.4 per cent of global steelmaking, strips oxygen from ore with coking coal by design.
- The electric arc furnace melts scrap or direct reduced iron with electricity at less than half the emissions intensity.
- Direct reduced iron made with green hydrogen and clean power comes close to zero.
- India has little old steel to recycle, so direct reduced iron in electric furnaces, not scrap, is its option.
What changed
8 Sep 2026
- 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.
- More than 43 million tonnes a year of Indian capacity falls due for relining before 2030.
- India's blast furnace share is projected to reach 56 per cent by 2030, though most of those plants have not broken ground.
Methane from paddy
Copy link to Methane from paddyPrelims and Mains
Flooded paddy fields release methane because microbes in waterlogged soil break down organic matter without oxygen.
- This makes rice one of the largest agricultural sources of the gas, and India's eastern paddy belt a global hotspot.
What changed
23 Jul 2026New
- A study in Nature Food finds that emissions from paddy fields worldwide have risen about 90 per cent since the 1960s, roughly half of it from loss of soil organic carbon.
- India's irrigated paddy alone releases about 3.9 million tonnes of methane a year.
- Better irrigation, fertiliser use, residue management and reduced tillage could cut rice emissions by about 10 per cent by mid century.
Mains: India has no emissions reduction target for agriculture.