Speaker
Description
Highlights / Discussion Points
- Scrap composition is the dominant environmental driver in specialty electric arc furnace steelmaking.
- Prospective life cycle assessment reveals how decarbonization reduces environmental impacts over time.
- Energy transition scenarios reveal that reductions in climate change impacts may come at the expense of higher land use requirements.
Concise Description
The decarbonization of specialty steelmaking increasingly relies on electric arc furnace (EAF) routes powered by low-carbon electricity. However, for high-performance grades such as H13 tool steel, widely used in hot-working applications including die-casting dies, extrusion tools, and forging equipment, environmental impacts are largely driven by the upstream burden embedded in alloying elements contained in input scraps and ferroalloys. Nickel-, cobalt-, and chromium-rich materials can exhibit upstream carbon footprints exceeding 20 kg CO₂-eq/kg, overshadowing the contribution of EAF electricity. Therefore, prospective life cycle assessment (pLCA) is a key tool for evaluating how environmental burdens evolve under energy system decarbonization and for identifying sustainable scrap selection strategies.
A pLCA was conducted for H13 steel produced via EAF using a pool of 203 industrial scrap grades and ferroalloys provided by the IRIDISCENTE project partners. The functional unit was 1 kg of H13 steel at the furnace gate. Inventories were modelled in Brightway2 using ecoinvent 3.12 cutoff as the background database. Prospective scenarios for 2030 and 2050 were generated with premise v2.4.2 using REMIND SSP2-PkBudg650 electricity projections. Environmental impacts were assessed using the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) v3.1 method.
Under baseline conditions, the optimal H13 scrap blend shows a carbon footprint of 0.82 kg CO₂-eq/kg steel, decreasing to 0.56 and 0.54 kg CO₂-eq/kg under the REMIND 2030 and 2050 scenarios, respectively, due to electricity decarbonization. Superalloy scrap families rich in Ni and Co exhibit the highest upstream impacts. Results show that, while climate change impacts decrease substantially, trade-offs emerge through increased land use associated with renewable electricity systems. The proposed framework supports sustainable scrap selection and environmental optimization in circular specialty steel production.
Funding
This research was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) through the ‘Artificial Intelligence for the sustainable design of efficient alloys and processes (IRIDISCENTE)’ research project (PLEC2023-010190).
Acknowledgements
Israel Carreira-Barral thanks Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León and European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) for his ‘Andrés Laguna’ post-doctoral contract (ref. AL-UBU-01, 2024 call). Julieta Díez-Hernández thanks the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades for her pre-doctoral contract (University Teachers’ Training Programme, ref. FPU/00605-2021).
| How much time do you ideally wish for your contribution? | TBD (Poster) |
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