New Delhi, (PTI) Roughly two years’ worth of global carbon emissions could be cut down by 2050 if iron and steel plants worldwide were upgraded earlier than their scheduled repair, scientists report in a new Nature study.
While upgrading these processing plants with low-emissions technology five years earlier than their scheduled refit could lower 70 gigatonnes of carbon emissions, retrofitting them at their scheduled refit could cut down roughly 60 gigatonnes of emissions, the researchers from the University College London, UK, said in their study.
Most of the total projected carbon savings, about 74 per cent, could be achieved by upgrading blast oxygen furnaces globally, all of which contribute to around 63 per cent of the world’s steel production, the research team found by creating a vast database of more than 19,500 individual processing units across nearly 4,900 iron and steel plants.