A Green Steel Dust-Up Is a Warning

American steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs cast doubt last week on the country’s most important green steel project. Chief executive Lourenco Goncalves suggested in an interview that the company was considering passing up $500 million of federal grants to build a new hydrogen-powered mill at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio, blaming fears that there won’t be buyers for the lower-carbon product, which he claimed could cost 40% more to produce than steel made by conventional methods. Cleveland-Cliffs later issued a short press release walking back Goncalves’s comments and reaffirming its commitment to the “transformational” project.

It’s, of course, possible that Goncalves was just expressing personal concerns that do not reflect the company’s official position. But either way, those doubts were not only real, but revealing about our prospects for decarbonization by mid-century.

First, the episode is a stark indictment of the many attempts to create demand for cleaner products by conjuring up corporate ambition on climate change. The entire rationale for cajoling corporations to quantify the emissions in their supply chains, known as Scope 3 emissions, has been to pressure them into sourcing greener inputs. The steel sector produces 7% to 9% of emissions globally: if it were a country, it would be the world’s third-biggest emitter after the United States and China. And steel represents the biggest single source of Scope 3 emissions for many companies in other industries — on the order of 40% to 45% for auto companies and as high as 85% for construction, for example. This makes steel a litmus test for whether Scope 3 footprinting and corporate commitments to green their supply chains are delivering as promised.

Worse, these types of steel buyers have ostensibly already been organized to show demand for green inputs. Before he stepped down as President Biden’s special envoy for climate, one of John Kerry’s cornerstone initiatives was the First Mover’s Coalition, an effort to secure advanced purchasing commitments from corporate buyers for green steel and other industrial materials. The fact that the coalition’s members – many of which are major steel buyers like Ford and General Motors – were not publically jumping all over the outputs of Cleveland-Cliffs’s heavily subsidized project is itself troubling. After all, while the green premium on steel may be significant, the material is typically a relatively cheap input into much more expensive, high value-added products.

Goncalves’s comments also underscore how uncomfortable incumbent industries perceive the jump to new, low-carbon products to be. Assume that the new Cleveland-Cliffs mill does in fact pencil out at the cost originally expected and that it has a reasonable prospect of finding offtakers. The company still says it has to invest $1.1 billion to complete the project. It is not really enough, in the logic of the market, for that investment to be profitable: It has to compete against the opportunity cost of alternative investments, including manufacturing conventional steel. Even if both outputs would find buyers, conventional steel may still be more profitable.

Now imagine the company is looking at the larger direction of the industry. If they don’t do this project, they may well forestall a shift to cleaner steel and be able to keep the sector chugging along more profitably for a little longer. Complete the project, and they may bring about changes that, while maybe inevitable, are uncomfortable for the industry. After all, Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel produce the vast majority of American primary steel; they are steel production in the United States – and so they get to shape its transformation.

This behavior is similar to that of the American car industry. U.S. automakers have largely conceded that electric vehicles will eventually overtake their combustion-engine counterparts, but they are still clinging to the better margins that gas-powered SUVs provide. The short-term profits are hard to pass up, even if it means getting farther behind EV first-movers like Tesla, BYD, and Hyundai. Once the technology pathway to a sector’s transition becomes clear — even when it feels inevitable — incumbents may still have an extremely hard time ripping off the bandaid.

It’s as if decarbonization is a massive marshmallow test for corporate America, and it’s failing.

There are essentially two ways out of this dilemma.

The first is that society will need to rely on new entrants to each sector to disrupt the status quo. Companies developing entirely novel steelmaking technologies like Boston Metals become more important to the steel transition than Cleveland-Cliffs, just as Tesla has been to the American EV market. Sublime Systems may be vital for green cement, just as Fervo Energy may be for enhanced geothermal. The problem with this approach is that it is extremely expensive to build projects in heavy industries like steel, so most pathways assume that even technology developed outside of the incumbents will get deployed by them (Sublime just this week announced a tie-up with cement giant Holcim).

This leads to option two: comprehensive industrial policy. Cleveland-Cliffs may want to see not only that one green project pencils out, but that strategic opportunities and risks favor going green. This might means measures like implementing a U.S. carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) to prevent foreign competitors from dumping dirty steel, the government guaranteeing offtake using public procurement programs like Buy Clean and Contracts for Difference, and ultimately policy sticks like carbon pricing that send a long-term signal favoring clean products over polluting ones, instead of relying on corporate social responsibility for a demand signal.

To decarbonize the economy, we will probably have to rely both on more robust industrial policy and the sector disruption from new entrants. While the story of this Cleveland-Cliffs project is far from over, the company’s apparent hesitancy, like that of U.S. automakers, may be teaching us a lesson that we have to learn quickly if we want to see decarbonization any time soon.