Lakshmi Mittal transformed steelmaking. Can his son do it again?

LAKSHMI MITTALCEODRIEAFDRIEAF has two passions: the steel industry and his family. His embrace of the first turned a poor boy from Rajasthan into the “Carnegie from Calcutta”, a man who built the world’s second-biggest steel empire from scratch, culminating in a takeover in 2006 of Arcelor, a European champion. The second sometimes sounds like tabloid fodder: lavish weddings in Paris; family homes—one known as the Taj Mittal—on London’s “Billionaire’s Row”. Yet Mr Mittal’s family knows the steel business inside out. Last year Aditya, his 46-year-old son, became of ArcelorMittal. It now falls to him to transform the industry again.That is because about half of ArcelorMittal’s revenue comes from Europe, where pressure to decarbonise steel production, source of up to a tenth of global carbon-dioxide emissions, is becoming irresistible. The region is laden with coal-burning blast furnaces, the carbon-heaviest of steelmaking technologies. Many are on their last legs. Rather than refurbishing them, some firms are opting to replace these with new direct-reduced-iron () and electric-arc-furnace () plants. Blast-furnace steelmaking is doubly carbon-intensive: it uses coking coal to soak up oxygen from iron ore, as well as dirty energy to heat the furnaces. - technology, hitherto dependent on natural gas, can use hydrogen and renewable energy instead. Once scaled up, it could mark a revolution in steelmaking. By jettisoning their once-cherished blast furnaces, European steelmakers hope to start slashing emissions this decade in order to become net-zero by mid-century.