The Iron and Steel, together with the cement industry, has hard-to-avoid CO₂ emissions. The Iron and Steel industry alone is responsible for an annual output of 2.5-3.0 GtCO₂/yr, with up to 10% originating from within the European Union. This represents 6% of total CO₂ emissions, and 16% of total industrial CO₂ emission. Moreover, a continuous average growth-rate of more than 3% per year is expected for the Iron and Steel industry in the foreseeable future. To avoid long-term climate change, every industrial sector must look to improving energy efficiency and decreasing C-footprint, as reaffirmed in the COP21 negotiations. The technology developed in the STEPWISE project has the potential to decrease CO₂ emissions worldwide by at least 1.5 Gt/yr based on current steel industry emission levels, with options for the same technology going forward that can decrease emissions even more.

  The STEPWISE project aims to decrease CO₂ emissions related to the steel making process from about 2 t_CO2/t_steel towards 0.5 t_CO2/t_steel by means of CO₂ removal from the Blast Furnace Gas. Translating this to worldwide scale, the technology being demonstrated in the Stepwise project has the potential to decrease the worldwide CO₂ emissions by 2.1 Gt/yr based on current emission levels. The conservative estimate is that by 2050 a potential cost saving of 750 times the project research costs will be realized every year, with a much larger potential. The overall objective is to secure jobs in the highly competitive European steel industry, a sector employing 360,000 skilled people with an annual turnover of 170 billion euro.