XCarb™ green steel offer

For the XCarb™ green steel offer, we are finetuning and validating the full metallurgical route, ensuring product quality guarantees at an affordable cost for our customers.

Arunim Ray

ArcelorMittal has announced clear and ambitious targets to reduce its carbon footprint. The commitment is to reduce emissions in Europe by 35% by 2030.

As part of this journey, ArcelorMittal has announced 3 initiatives in the framework of the new XCarb™ brand: XCarb™ innovation fund, XCarb™ green steel certificates, and XCarb™ recycled and renewably produced pioneering products. The XCarb™ innovation fund will invest up to $100 million per year in ground-breaking technologies to accelerate the steel industry transition to carbon-neutral steelmaking, and XCarb™ green steel certificates aims to sell certificates for green steel tons, enabled by the smart carbon investments, to allow customers to reduce their scope 3 carbon emissions. Last but not least, a brand-new family of low footprint products, called XCarb™ RRP (recycled and renewably produced), will be released into the market. Recycled and renewably produced means that the physical steel was made with recycled material (scrap) using renewable electricity. This gives the produced steel an extremely low CO2 footprint, which can be as low as approximately 300 kg of CO2 per tonne of finished steel when the metallic input is almost 100% scrap. The electricity used in the steel-making process is verified independently and receives a ‘Guarantee of Origin’ to attest that it is from renewable sources. This product range will be a short-term first wave of green ‘physical’ products. OCAS is tackling multiple challenges to develop this short-term product offer. ArcelorMittal’s core asset in developing these products is the electric arc furnace fed thin slab casting line of ArcelorMittal Sestao. On the one hand, ArcelorMittal Sestao is being given support to fine-tune the steelmaking, casting and hot-rolling parameters to ensure product equivalency of this new range of products compared to the classical ArcelorMittal offer within the philosophy of producing ‘as green as possible’. On the other hand, a series of new streamline combinations are on their way to being implemented, combining upstream material coming from Sestao with production on specific downstream facilities. This way of working enables the XCarb™ RRP brand to be combined with the typical ArcelorMittal high-added-value product offer such as Magnelis® or Granite® HDX. The focus of OCAS’s work is to fine-tune and validate the full metallurgical route, ensuring product quality guarantees and the most cost-effective method of production for our customers.