Material Metabolism and Environmental Emissions of BF-BOF and EAF Steel Production Routes

As an energy-intensive industry, iron and steel production are suffering from the resource and environmental issues. Blast furnace—basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) process and electric arc furnace (EAF) process are the two most common routes of steel production. Therefore, it is very important to quantify the industrial metabolism for the two routes. In this work, material flow analysis is used to comparatively investigate the energy efficiency, material efficiency, and emissions intensity at the enterprise level. The results show that the total energy consumption and material consumption per ton of steel of the BF-BOF route are 2.8 and 11 times larger than those of the EAF route, respectively. In addition, the emission intensities of dust, CO2, SO2, NO2 and CO of the BF-BOF route are 7.7, 2.6, 92.6, 33.5, and 12.0 times greater than those of the EAF route, respectively. To achieve a more sustainable steel industry, some policy recommendations are put forward finally.