The City of Cleveland’s long-term climate plans are dependent on the future of a Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill on the city’s south side, a report from an environmental advocacy nonprofit finds.
The Cleveland Works steel mill is a massive industrial facility that turns raw iron ore into steel, a metal used to make cars, tools and buildings. The process relies on a form of coal, a fossil fuel that releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air when burned.
Cleveland ultimately wants the city to produce net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Cleveland Works is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide in Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina counties combined, according to the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency (NOACA). Emissions from the steel mill made up about 30% of Cleveland’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, according to EPA data and the city’s Climate Action Plan. In 2023, that increased to 47% of the city’s emissions after the steel mill returned to pre-pandemic emission levels, according to Industrious Labs. Industrious Labs is a nonprofit that advocates for emissions reductions in heavy industry.
The city’s “goal is to get to net zero,” said Hilary Lewis, the director of steel research at Industrious Labs. “ …If you’re not addressing 47% of the pollution, you’re never going to get to zero.”
Both the City of Cleveland and larger regional planning organizations such as NOACA are reckoning with the challenge of bringing down industrial emissions, according to their climate action plans. A recently released draft of NOACA’s Comprehensive Climate Action Plan writes that efforts to decarbonize steelmaking are “essential” to the City of Cleveland.
From coal to ‘green hydrogen’?
But what does green steel look like? Industrious Labs is advocating for Cleveland-Cliffs to transition the Cleveland Works steel manufacturing process from reliance on coal to green hydrogen. Hydrogen is referenced in the the climate action plans produced by the City of Cleveland and NOACA as a way to make the industrial sector cleaner. But the two reports also mention carbon capture, which essentially means trapping the polluting gas from a factory and burying it underground.
Cleveland officials declined to provide a comment to Signal Cleveland on the Industrious Labs report. But the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability gave a statement to Spectrum News 1 in July acknowledging the need for Cleveland-Cliffs to take action in order for the city to meet its climate targets.
“The City has worked closely with Cliffs in recent years to identify plans to invest in sustainability and decarbonization at Cleveland Works,” wrote Tim Kovach, a Cleveland decarbonization strategist, according to Spectrum News 1. “Unfortunately, Cliffs appears to be stepping back from some of its more ambitious climate commitments.”
Cleveland-Cliffs did not respond to requests for comment on whether it was open to operating its Cleveland Works facility with hydrogen or had other plans to reduce carbon emissions there. While the company as a whole does have greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals, it recently canceled a similar “green steel” project in Middletown, Ohio, local radio station WYSO reported.
A change to how steel is made
The Cleveland Works steel mill began operating on the banks of the Cuyahoga River more than a century ago. Manufacturing, particularly steel, went on to dominate Cleveland’s economy in the midst of the 20th century.
But since the late 1980s, employment within steel and iron mills fell precipitously across the U.S. The Cleveland Works steel mill – then known as the ArcelorMittal steel mill – had seen its staffing shrink significantly by 2016, cleveland.com reported. Today, the union that works within the Cleveland Works steel plant represents more than 1,700 hourly employees, according to its website.
The job of the mill is to turn rusty, naturally occurring iron ore into steel. The goal is to burn off some of the impurities in the iron, including oxygen. One method of doing that is mixing a form of coal with the iron ore in a giant, heated structure called a blast furnace.
When the coal — called coke — and oxygen are burned together, they form carbon dioxide.
Lewis said it’s possible to replace the coal with hydrogen. That way, the hydrogen and oxygen form water instead of carbon dioxide when the iron ore is burned.
But there are a few challenges.
One is cost. The hydrogen steel-creation method requires new construction.
“This is not a tweak,” Lewis said. “You need to tear down the blast furnace and build a new type of furnace to replace it.”
Industrious Labs is encouraging Ohio’s Department of Development and JobsOhio to support the transition at Cleveland Works by offering subsidies and tax breaks for infrastructure development. Signal Cleveland contacted the Ohio Department of Development and JobsOhio. Neither organization provided a comment on the Industrious Labs report.
Another difficulty is access to hydrogen. Making hydrogen is an energy-intensive process in itself. The creation of hydrogen in a low-carbon way requires renewable electricity sources.
“Hydrogen availability is a problem, but the root of hydrogen availability is access to clean energy,” Lewis said.
Lack of hydrogen availability is one reason Cleveland-Cliffs cited for canceling their Middletown Steel project this June, Steel Industry News reported. The federal government under the Biden administration had plans to build “hydrogen hubs” around the country, using funding from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But the project has faced criticism as it’s been slow to announce matching private-sector investment and share specifics, Canary Media reported last October. The hub that Ohio is a part of – the Appalachian Regional Clean Energy Hydrogen Hub – does not yet have specifics on where any project sites will be located.
The Trump administration floated some threats to funding of the hydrogen hubs in Democratic states, according to Politico, but left the Appalachian hub untouched.
When and how to make the transition to green steel
The Cleveland Works steel mill has two blast furnaces that produce carbon dioxide. Industrious Labs asked the City of Cleveland to work with Cleveland-Cliffs to start converting one of them to hydrogen immediately.
The other blast furnace could transition by 2042, the group suggested.
The climate plan produced by NOACA suggested a longer timeline for converting the steelmaking to using hydrogen, a process called direct reduced iron with hydrogen.
“Right now, it does not make commercial sense” to switch to this type of steelmaking because the cost of hydrogen and construction are “extremely” expensive, the organization wrote in its climate plan. The plan estimated that hydrogen steelmaking would become commercially viable for replacing both blast furnaces at Cleveland Works by 2040.
The City of Cleveland’s climate action plan does not offer a timeline or tactics for decarbonizing the Cleveland Works facility specifically. Instead, its goals are broader: “Coordinate with key industry partners to identify priority pathways to decarbonization, including hydrogen and carbon capture.”
Carbon capture and sequestration essentially means capturing the polluting gas the factory is emitting and burying it underground. In its climate action plan, NOACA also mentioned carbon capture as an option to address emissions at the Cleveland Works plant. The organization carried out preliminary cost calculations and laid out several options for where the carbon dioxide could be buried and stored in Ohio.
In its report, though, Industrious Labs discouraged Cleveland-Cliffs from pursuing carbon capture and sequestration at Cleveland Works. The carbon capture and sequestration industry has not been financially or technically viable at scale, the organization said.