Efforts in the steel industry to increase the metal’s environment friendliness – a process known as “green steel” – will assist diversified miner Anglo American in reducing its Scope 3 emissions, outgoing Anglo American CE Mark Cutifani has said.

Speaking during an investor day on December 10, he said that although the world needed the metals and minerals Anglo produced, the work the company has done to lower its carbon intensity in its portfolio over the past eight or nine years has set it up for a “very different future”.

This is in comparison to other mining companies that Cutifani alluded may have not done as much as Anglo has in terms of mitigating its impact on climate change, and “certainly those companies that are somewhat captive to one or two operating assets”.

In terms of its Scope 3 emissions, he said the company was “pretty confident” it could deliver the ambition of a 50% reduction by 2040, and that if the steel industry was able to decarbonise in line with a Paris Agreement-aligned 1.5 ^oC increase from the preindustrial era trajectory, then it might be able to reduce its Scope 3 emissions by as much as 80% by 2040.

“We are going to encourage that pace of change as much as we can and that is through the push into green steel, high-quality iron-ore, high-quality metallurgical coal; and then with the transition, the iron-ore and the high-quality iron-ore becomes even more important . . . we think we are advantaged by that push both in the medium and longer term,” said Cutifani.

Nonetheless, from Anglo’s current baseline, to 2030, he said the company expects its Scope 3 emissions to rise marginally, driven by a combination of the growth in its portfolio and the pace of which it will outstrip the rate of decarbonisation value chains, especially for steel.

“Even with our 35% growth in production by 2030, our Scope 3 increases only a fraction of that growth – that indicates that the growth is coming in through lower carbon intensity areas of the business,” said Cutifani.

As it progresses through the 2030s, he said Anglo will continue to lower its emissions and grow with new projects of which its UK-based Woodsmith polyhalite project was a good example in that it could “change the look and the feel of the company into the [20]30s”.

“With assets such as Woodsmith, Quellaveco and Collahuasi all underpinning the future of the business; it is a very different-looking Anglo today than it was even five years ago,” said Cutifani.