Anglo American has partnered with Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation to accelerate the transition to lower-carbon steel making to help drive emissions reduction.
The group, which supplies coal and iron ore to steel customers around the world, said it signed a memorandum of understanding to work with Nippon Steel.
Nippon Steel is engaged in steel manufacturing, engineering, chemical and materials, and system solutions.
As part of this agreement, the two companies will research ways to optimise premium lump ore produced by Anglo American’s mines to decrease emissions via the traditional blast furnace (BF) steel-making process.
The project will also focus on studying the use of Anglo American’s iron ore in the more carbon-efficient direct reduction iron (DRI) steel-making method.
“DRI is estimated to generate significantly lower emissions than the more prevalent steel-making routes of blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnaces,” Anglo American said.
This partnership comes at a time when mining companies are under pressure to adopt sustainable business practices and reduce the effects that mining has on the environment over the complete life-cycle of a mine.
Anglo American marketing business chief executive, Peter Whitcutt, said: “This agreement is an important component of Anglo American’s approach to collaborating with our customers and helping to shape a greener future for the backbone of global infrastructure – steel.
“By working together, we can drive towards system-level decarbonisation and pave the way for sustainable steel-making, underpinning the steel industry’s full potential as an enabler of society’s wider economic prosperity and social development.”
Whitcutt said Anglo American’s product portfolio focuses on future-enabling metals and minerals that crucial to the transition to a lower-carbon world.
“Working with our customers is one of the cornerstones of our efforts to reduce emissions across our entire value chain – the majority of which are associated with the downstream-use of our products in steel making.“
In October, 2021 Anglo American published its Climate Change Report, and the company set out an ambition to reduce Scope 3 emissions by 50 percent by 2040, building on a pre-existing commitment to reach carbon neutrality across its operations by the same year.
Meanwhile, in March, 2021 Nippon Steel announced its “Nippon Steel Carbon Neutral Vision 2050”, an initiative to respond to climate change. The group aims to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
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