Making steel with clean energy would curb health risks, report says

Donna Ballinger has lived in the shadows of Ohio’s Middletown steel mill her entire life. The hulking furnaces surrounding Ballinger’s home have long been an economic engine for this city just north of Cincinnati. They’re also among the dirtiest facilities in the state, when it comes to pumping toxic pollution into the air.

“This stuff just gets in your house. Everyone around here has some kind of breathing problem,” Ballinger, 60, said by phone, adding that she has a form of lung disease herself. On bad days, the nearby coal-burning furnaces can spew so much soot into the surrounding air that it looks like someone flicked black paint all over her white car.

Middletown Works, which is now owned by Cleveland-Cliffs, is one of seven coal-based steel mills still operating in the United States. The neighboring coke plant, which processes coal to use in blast furnaces, is among 10 such facilities nationwide.

Many newer U.S. steel facilities use electricity to melt iron and scrap into secondary metal, generating fewer emissions in the process. But the nation still relies on coal-based ironmaking furnaces and coke plants to make primary steel — and these facilities are significant sources of pollution and planet-warming emissions.

A new report by the advocacy group Industrious Labs analyzes the risks that coal-based steelmaking poses to human health, in Southwest Ohio and beyond — and highlights low-carbon steelmaking techniques as a way to address this urgent problem.

The study, released on Monday, found that the 17 facilities — all clustered in the Midwest — are together responsible for between $6.9 billion and $13.2 billion in annual health impacts, including asthma symptoms, emergency room visits, and premature deaths. Analysts estimated that the amount of lost work hours and school days due to poor health outcomes amounts to $137 million in economic losses every year.

“The thing I find most shocking is how big the impacts are for how few the number of facilities are,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director for Industrious Labs. She noted that existing research has tended to look at the health burden of individual steel facilities, or to focus on the sizable levels of carbon dioxide emissions that spew from the industry’s smokestacks.

“There hasn’t been this type of analysis for an industry that is relatively this small,” Lewis added.

Low-income residents and people of color, who represent a high proportion of the populations living near many of the nation’s steel facilities, tend to bear the brunt of these health impacts, according to the group’s analysis of federal environmental justice data.

The report arrives as U.S. steel companies are grappling with how to transition from their coal-based plants to alternative models that are less emissions intensive, all while maintaining their workforce. Steel mills directly employ around 18,000 people, most of whom are union workers.

Cleveland-Cliffs, for its part, has landed a $500 million federal award to convert its Middletown blast furnace — which turns iron ore into metallic iron — to a facility that can run on fossil gas and, eventually, green hydrogen. The conversion is expected to dramatically reduce air pollution and limit CO2 emissions when it comes online around 2029. But the company was weighing abandoning the project as recently as last month, citing the reluctance of steel buyers to pay a higher price for low-carbon metal.

The Ohio-based manufacturer is also contemplating a major maintenance overhaul at its steel operation in Burns Harbor, Indiana, that could lock in coal use at the plant for decades. At its Indiana Harbor facility, the company is planning to reduce some of its coal use by injecting hydrogen into the blast furnace. The fuel might eventually be piped in from the federally backed Midwest Hydrogen Hub project underway in Illinois. But that strategy would likely have limited benefits for air quality and the climate, experts say.

Injecting hydrogen into a blast furnace ​“can reduce [CO2] emissions by up to around 20 percent, if you blend at the maximum technical limit,” said Kaitlyn Ramirez, a senior associate in RMI​’s Climate-Aligned Industries Program. ​“But fundamentally, you’re still using a large amount of coal, and so it still produces a significant amount of carbon emissions as well as all the other health pollutants.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Steel, the country’s other primary steel producer, is in a holding pattern as the Pittsburgh manufacturer tries to sell its assets to Japan’s Nippon Steel — a troubled deal that’s raised the concerns of everyone from environmentalists to both presidential candidates. Nippon Steel has pledged to invest $300 million to ​“revamp” the blast furnace at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works in Indiana to extend its operational life and, presumably, coal use by up to 20 years.

“We’re at a time now when, both for climate and health reasons, there’s a real push to get off of coal, and we’ve seen that decline in other industries, including our electrical sector,” said Nadia Steinzor, a consultant who wrote and researched the Industrious Labs report. ​“But steelmaking still relies so heavily on coal,” since the fossil fuel is needed to drive chemical reactions inside furnaces.

For the new report, Industrious Labs used self-reported industry data from the 2020 National Emissions Inventory run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Analysts put those numbers through EPA’s CO-Benefits Risk Assessment tool, which translates pollution into projected health impacts and costs. They also ranked each coal-based steel and coke plant based on emissions of criteria air pollutants to see how they stacked up against other major polluters in their respective states.

Take nitrogen oxides, for example. NOx forms particulate matter and ozone, both of which cause or contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Four of the country’s seven steel plants are among the top 10 highest emitters of NOx in the states where they’re located: Middletown Works in Ohio, and the Indiana Harbor, Burns Harbor, and Gary Works facilities in Indiana.

At the state level, six of the country’s steel plants are among the top 10 highest emitters of particulate matter 2.5, which also damages people’s lungs and hearts and contributes to haze pollution.

Industrious Labs urged the EPA to more closely scrutinize steel-related facilities and to strictly enforce federal air-quality rules. Donna Ballinger, the Middletown resident, has been pushing state and regional regulators to do the same for years and has filed hundreds of complaints related to the soot and nauseating smells outside her home.

Advocates also called for more federal investment to help move the U.S. steel industry away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies, including ironmaking plants that run on renewable energy and green hydrogen. Efforts to make that shift are still extremely early and have already encountered major setbacks. But ditching coal in particular would help address the major climate and health impacts that both stem from these aging plants.

“We’re not trying to shut down any of these facilities,” Lewis added. ​“The solution here is to transition them.”