On the shores of Lake Michigan, Megan Robertson stood in front of a group of journalists at a park in Whiting, Ind. To the north, Chicago’s skyline rises over the lake.
“You look over here and you’ve got this beautiful shoreline, you’ve got nature, you see Chicago. It’s great. People are walking around, going on trails,” she said. “And then you look over here.”
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Robertson gestured over her other shoulder, toward a hulking mass of industrial buildings and smokestacks just across a small bay. This is Indiana Harbor, a massive tangle of steel mills and other industrial plants. Robertson calls it “kind of an industrial wasteland.”
“I grew up here. It still shocks me when I drive through.”
Robertson’s grandfather worked in the steel mills here. Now head of Indiana Conservation Voters, she was one of a handful of speakers on a recent tour for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual convention in Chicago.
Northern Indiana’s shorefront steel industry is the largest grouping of steel mills in the country. About 20 percent of the country’s steel is made here.
Despite decades of decline, these are still an economic engine for the local economy, Robertson said.
“You can make a really good living for your family, but there’s also physical and environmental sacrifices that come with that,” she said.
Those sacrifices are largely due to the traditional coal-based steelmaking process these plants rely on. For U.S. Steel’s Gary Works nearby, the process begins in Western Pennsylvania. The company processes coal at its Clairton plant near Pittsburgh into a refined product called coke.
The coke is shipped by rail to Gary, where it’s put in a blast furnace to make iron. The iron is then turned into steel. This process creates several thousand tons of local air pollution a year; and makes Gary Works Indiana’s top greenhouse gas polluter. That is a problem, Robertson said.
“We don’t want people going without jobs. We don’t what things shut down,” she said. “But we have to start the transition eventually.”
Can steel companies move away from coal?
Local activists like Robertson want that transition to happen as soon as possible. And U.S. Steel’s recent sale to Nippon Steel of Japan has raised their hopes.
“I’ve seen the history of the industry. And I want this industry to continue for future generations. And I also want the industry to clean up its act … environmentally,” said Terry Steagall, a retired union steelworker from the area and member of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, a local watchdog group.
The best way to clean up, Steagall said, is to take coal out of the process entirely. Steelmakers around the world are beginning to adopt a process called direct reduction of iron, or DRI. This uses natural gas or hydrogen instead of coal to convert iron ore – a mineral extracted from the ground – into iron, the main component of steel.
The process is cleaner than using coal, and produces fewer carbon emissions.
U.S. Steel recently said it would spend $1.9 billion at its Big River Steel Works in Osceola, Ark. to install DRI. That facility uses the more modern electric arc furnace to convert iron into steel.
But doing the same at older mills like Gary Works, which uses a traditional coke-fired blast furnace to make iron, would require a major overhaul at Gary Works, which has been in operation for over a century. There, the company would need to build new electric arc furnaces to make iron, increasing the cost.
U.S. Steel has said this would result in job losses and be “financially disastrous” for the company. It also says there are some types of steel that DRI can’t produce.
Steagall argues money shouldn’t be a problem. Nippon has promised to invest $11 billion in the company’s US plants, including $4 billion in Gary.
The company said in an emailed statement investments at Gary “are about making the steel we already produce cleaner, more efficient, and higher quality, especially for the auto industry.”
The company said the money earmarked for Gary “will update equipment, allowing for new products to be created and enabling us to use less coke in the steelmaking process. These upgrades directly support community health while protecting thousands of good-paying jobs, keeping the plant competitive and able to provide generational job security.”
Steagall wants the company to go further, by fully switching to DRI.
“We’ve been advocating for the DRI at Gary Works because they have the technology and they have the money, and that’s the key. In the past, the industry would try to say, well, we don’t have the technologies, we don’t have the money,” he said. “Well, U.S. Steel and Nippon don’t have that excuse.”
Robertson put it more succinctly.
“You’re going to invest in this new technology in other places, while keeping us with the old technology?” she said. “The future of steelmaking should be in northwest Indiana. It should be in Pittsburgh and the places where this industry was built.”
What will it take for the American steel industry to go ‘fossil-free’?
What will Nippon decide?
But will Nippon move off of coal? Globally, steel accounts for around 10 percent of all global warming emissions, and moving away from coal has been a slow process.
But even among steel companies, Nippon has been particularly slow, said Roger Smith of the environmental watchdog, Steel Watch. Smith has studied Nippon Steel – the world’s fourth biggest steelmaker – for years.
“This is a company that has built its global success on coal, on [coke-based] blast furnaces, and it’s very reluctant to change course,” he said. “So despite the fact that we’re in a new era of decarbonization, Nippon Steel is actually acquiring coal mines around the world, including in Canada and Australia.”
The company said it wants to ensure access to coal as countries move away from it in an attempt to lower their carbon footprints.
The company’s own climate goals call for “carbon neutrality” by 2050.
In Gary: “I would love for our community to thrive”
A few blocks from Gary Works, the tour wound its way to the roof of a parking garage, for a better view of the plant. It has massive blue-walled industrial buildings, tubes and pipes, with plumes of steam and smoke coming out at various points.
Kianna Grant, Air Quality Control Manager for the City of Gary was on the roof. She works in the municipal building, across the street from the Gary Works, where she keeps a watchful eye on the plant’s various smokestacks and gas flares.
“We’re in communication with them very often about what they do to make sure that there’s transparency,” Grant said.
The company announced it would spend $350 million to replace the bricks inside the largest of the plant’s four blast furnaces. The process, called re-lining–would extend the life of the coal-based blast furnace another 15 to 20 years.
Grant thinks the company will eventually have to make a decision on whether the plant will switch to cleaner processes.
“I would love for our community to thrive in health and to thrive in the economy. And so I think there might be a good balance of both,” Grant said. “You’ll always have a fight between economy and public health, but I think there could be a healthy dose of both.”
