Two Ways to Make Steel, and the Industry Is Shifting Between Them
Blast furnace steelmaking reduces iron ore with coke. Electric arc furnaces melt scrap directly. The shift between them is the real green steel story.
Steel is made two genuinely different ways, and which one a country relies on shapes both its emissions profile and its raw material needs.
The blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) route
Iron ore is reduced with coke in a blast furnace, producing molten pig iron, which is then refined into steel in a basic oxygen furnace:
The electric arc furnace (EAF) route
Scrap steel, or sometimes direct reduced iron, is melted directly using a powerful electric arc, without the coke reduction step at all, a fundamentally lower-carbon route when the electricity comes from a cleaner grid.
Why the country split matters
Italy, the United States, and the European Union have shifted heavily toward EAF, largely because abundant scrap and established grid infrastructure make it viable, while China’s steel industry remains overwhelmingly BF-BOF, built around its own large coking coal and iron ore supply chains, covered on this material’s geology page.
Sources: blast furnace chemistry and route shares draw on standard extractive metallurgy references (worldsteel); production figures reference the production data elsewhere on this site.