Steel
Iron alloyed with a little carbon: the backbone of buildings, machines and transport, made at about 1.9 billion tonnes a year.
Steel & alloying · No. 13
- Not on a critical list
China makes more steel than the rest of the world combined: 1.01 billion of 1.88 billion tonnes in 2024.
Chart: Illustration: Steel
Where it comes from
Chart: Map of where it comes from
Steel is made, not mined. Blast furnaces smelt iron ore with coke, then oxygen burns off excess carbon; or electric arc furnaces melt old scrap.
Three things to know
- Recycling one tonne of steel saves about 1.1 tonnes of iron ore and 0.6 tonne of coking coal.
- North America recycles more than 13 million tonnes of steel a year from roughly 17 million scrapped cars.
- Making steel from scrap emits about 0.71 t CO2e per tonne, against 2.66 t via the blast furnace.
The journey
- 1 Raw materialsIron ore, coking coal, limestone, or scrap
- 2 Blast furnaceSmelts ore into molten pig iron
- 3 SteelmakingOxygen furnace, or arc furnace melting scrap
- 4 CastingContinuously cast into slab, billet, bloom
- 5 RollingCoil, plate, rebar and sections