Nippon Steel lags behind at going green, according to a new report from environmental group SteelWatch, highlighting concerns the Japanese firm could be a bad influence on subsidiary U.S. Steel.
Nippon’s progress toward ultra-low-emission steelmaking ranked 17th out of 18 companies given a “corporate scorecard” Monday by SteelWatch, a global organization dedicated to decarbonizing the industry. The firm was penalized hardest for its rising coal use and weak efforts to protect workers and communities from pollutants.
U.S. Steel received the eighth-highest score, buoyed by declining greenhouse gas emissions and above-average transparency about its operations. Like many companies in the report, including Nippon, U.S. Steel’s score was hurt by its minimal use of cleanly made iron.
Andrew Fulton, a U.S. Steel spokesman, thoroughly rejected the report in a statement. SteelWatch wants companies to adopt technology that is either inaccessible or unaffordable without major government subsidies, he said. The goal of SteelWatch and other “anti-business groups,” in his view, is to make U.S. Steel tear down blast furnaces and replace them with newer systems.
“What SteelWatch ignores is the true cost — thousands of jobs lost and a financially disastrous change in operations,” Fulton said.
Nippon did not immediately return a TribLive request for comment.
No firm earned even half of the possible points from SteelWatch, which used financial disclosures and other public information for its analysis, though Sweden’s SSAB performed the best.
The report says that while climate goals and testing less-polluting technologies have become common among steelmakers, “none of them are decarbonizing at an acceptable pace.” The industry is responsible for 11% of the world’s carbon emissions, per SteelWatch.
Scores were based on data from fiscal year 2024 and earlier. Nippon didn’t buy U.S. Steel until June, meaning the firms were ranked separately.
There are signs U.S. Steel could backslide by the next report. SteelWatch is most concerned about Nippon spending $350 million to reline a blast furnace at the Gary Works in Indiana, which could extend the coke-burning furnace’s ability to smelt iron by another 20 years.
SteelWatch executive director Caroline Ashley called the blast furnace plans “depressing.” The project is set to start in May. If work goes ahead, Nippon’s obstacles toward decarbonization will be “too great to overcome,” the report said.
Nippon is also moving to build a more than $1 billion hot strip mill and $100 million slag recycler at the Edgar Thomson Works, a 151-year-old steel plant straddling Braddock and North Braddock. The recycler will replace open air slag pits, slashing emissions in the process, according to U.S. Steel.
But the recycler’s environmental benefits will be negligible compared to shifting away from blast furnaces, SteelWatch noted.
“This is sort of a similar thing that Nippon Steel does in their strategy as a whole,” said Toko Tomita, campaigns director for SteelWatch. “They’re quite stuck on incremental changes.”
In what’s likely a welcome move for environmental advocates, Nippon is investing an unknown amount of money in a direct reduced iron plant at U.S. Steel’s Big River complex in Arkansas, a cleaner way to purify iron ore than traditional blast furnaces.
But much of Nippon’s $11 billion investment pledge through 2028 is still unannounced, and SteelWatch fears more of it will go toward perpetuating older technologies than implementing new ones.
“This $11 billion is going to be very important for us to watch and steer,” Tomita said. “We believe it could go either way, but the signs are really worrying.”
