Radical plan to reduce environmental footprint
E UROPEAN steel companies are working hard to reduce the impact on their operations of the impending next round of European Union carbon constraints.
Confronted by a proposal to establish a benchmark for emissions trading from 2013 based on the lowest output of carbon dioxide achieved by their production lines, the whole European steel industry is campaigning for exemptions in the next permit auction.
The European Parliament sitting in Brussels is currently deliberating over the policy. Emissions trading is the core of the EU’s campaign to reduce the 27- nation bloc’s carbon footprint by a fifth by 2020. Under its rules, more than 11,000 industrial plants and power operations — which currently release 2 billion tonnes of CO a year, almost four times Australia’s entire annual national emissions — will be taken in to a third phase of the scheme that has been widely criticised as inefficient.
EU governments plan to move the scheme to full auctioning of permits in 2020, amid controversy over arrangements now that are seen as too lenient and which are claimed to have complaint is that governments bend the trading rules to suit their local convenience. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest iron and steel company, currently is pursuing the French Government through the courts because it says the steel industry is being treated differently to the aluminium and plastics industries.
In recent lobbying on the issue, the giant German ThyssenKrupp Steel Group echoed the concerns of Australian energy- intensive manufacturers that European steel operations are heavily disadvantaged under the EU trading scheme in competition with steelmakers in countries not imposing carbon constraints. Gunnar Still, ThyssenKrupp chairman, says 10,000 jobs at the company’s main site — and Europe’s biggest steel plant — in Duisberg are under threat.
Still argues that the outcome of EU policy will be the slow abandonment of Europe by the steel industry, without its contribution to global levels of greenhouse gases being reduced because the giant firms will relocate to the developing world. Keith Orchison