BlueScope Appoints Ms Gretta as Chief Executive Climate Change
BlueScope announced the establishment of a new Executive Leadership Team position by appointing Ms Gretta Stephens as Chief Executive Climate Change. Ms Gretta will lead BlueScope’s new Climate Change function. With her technical background in engineering and materials science, and her track record of working with government and wider industry to solve macro problems, Ms Gretta is ideally placed to lead this new global function. Ms Gretta will now drive the work already underway, including decarbonisation pathway and long term carbon reduction aspirations. Ms Gretta's new team will explore a range of technologies to understand the scale of emissions reduction they might deliver, potential costs and timeframes and the barriers and enablers to implementation.
BlueScope recognises that the future of iron and steelmaking will need to be centred on breakthrough technologies, once proven and scalable. Exciting work is being undertaken around the globe to explore breakthrough green steel' iron making technologies including using hydrogen and electrolysis. These technologies are currently in early stages of technology readiness with significant advances expected to occur over the next decade. For success, such initiatives will need international collaboration across the industry value chain, supportive public policy, and affordable, renewable and reliable energy.
In the shorter term, the steel sector will need to rely on technology performance improvements within conventional routes, increased use of renewable energy and other abatement measures including optimising raw material mixes, capturing and reusing a greater proportion of waste heat and gases, and potentially replacing a proportion of the coal currently used in the process with alternative reluctant such as biomass or hydrogen-containing gas such as coke ovens gas. Increased rates of scrap usage, and greater use of renewable energy to cut Scope 2 emissions, are also being considered.
In FY2021, BlueScope will release the outcomes of climate scenario analysis, along with long term carbon reduction aspiration and pathway. This will be supported by participation in
1. Founding member of ResponsibleSteel, first global multi-stakeholder standard and certification programme for steel
2. Founding member of Net zero Steel Pathway Methodology Project, global initiative establishing a recognised net zero transition pathway methodology for the steel sector
3. Australian Industry Energy Transitions Initiative, industry led initiative to develop pathways to net zero emission supply chains across critical sectors of the Australian economy
4. Stepup, benchmarking initiative for steel sites to identify opportunities for improvement in steel mill operating parameters
5. Participated in the review of the IEA steel sector roadmap, released in October 2020
Source - Strategic Research Institute