Prospective LCA on the Design of New Refractories for a Greener Steelmaking Process

Being one of the most energy-intensive industries, steel manufacturing is among the most challenging sectors to decarbonise. This project aims to describe and quantify possible innovative green steelmaking processes through a comprehensive approach, with a focus on new refractory materials and their impact on the process.
Steel is essential to our society, and its usage has grown dramatically in recent decades, with an increase of annual global production of crude steel from 850 Mt in 2000, to 1869 Mt in 2019. In 2019, the building and infrastructure sector is the first steel user, followed by the mechanical equipment, transport and metal products sectors. Iron and steel industry has a considerable environmental impact, especially related to energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion and water pollution. Therefore, sustainable production of iron and steel is a huge hard task, essential to preserve our environment.
To face the challenge, this study analyses the impact of new refractory materials on the global environmental burden generated by the steelmaking process. In the first phase, strategies to reduce the impact of new refractory materials are evaluated, by optimizing
production routes and raw material sourcing. In the second phase, the usage of these new refractories in steelmaking is investigated, by the quantification of how the change of their properties can impact on the overall environmental footprint.
Moreover, to further improve the sustainability of the process, the EAF (Electric Arc Furnace) has been chosen as the core of the steelmaking, and the recycle of refractories is under discussion. For both the phases, the key interest methodology LCA has been chosen to quantify the global environmental footprint.
The relevance of the study relies in the comprehensive and complex approach to the green steel problem, taking advantage of the well-known tool LCA to promote a joint and prospective vision of the product over its entire lifecycle, to address both to the
refractory producers and the steel industry. Moreover, the direct collaboration with the two production sectors will allow to obtain a big quantity of real data for the inventory creation. The result of the study should give a powerful tool to renovate steel-making
processes, by providing alternative production routes that are not so far from the reality and that could be easily implemented, helping to reach the “green targets” in the short and medium term.