China: Steel included in ambitious plan to overhaul materials standards system

Mysteel Global: China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has announced an ambitious plan to drive high-quality development in key basic materials industries, including steel, by enhancing standardisation, Mysteel Global learned from the ministry's December 17 release.

MIIT and related government departments on Tuesday jointly released their "Action Plan for Standard Upgrades to Drive Optimisation and Upgrading of the Basic Materials Industry (2025-2027)," under which they intend to complete the evaluation and optimisation of standards in industries, including petrochemicals, chemicals, steel, non-ferrous metals, building materials, rare earths, and gold by 2027.

Specifically, the action plan stipulates that over the next three years, more than 200 standards related to digital transformation will be decided, released and implemented, along with over 100 standards for new materials, and at least another 100 more for low-carbon initiatives, the statement said.

For the steel industry, priority will be given to developing technical standards related to production safety and the adoption and use of smart equipment, according to the plan. Regarding finished steel properties and qualities, emphasis will be placed on the formulation and revision of standards for advanced materials used in marine engineering, special equipment, bearings, and steel structure construction, the release said.

More importantly, under the action plan, standards will be formulated for low carbon production processes such as electric-arc-furnace (EAF) steelmaking, hydrogen metallurgy, and carbon dioxide recovery.

Accordingly, more standards will be developed for carbon peaking and carbon neutrality in the steel industry, including methods for calculating carbon emissions for key emitters and rules for carbon footprint tracking, the plan states.

In fact, last September the Ministry of Ecology and Environment had announced that within this year the steel industry would be included in the country's national carbon emissions trading market, as Mysteel Global reported, though details relating to the trading market are still being finalised.

China's basic materials industries have seen significant growth over the past decade, but they still struggle to achieve high-quality development, according to Chang Guowu, director of the Raw Materials Industry Department under MIIT, saying that the key challenges lie in excess low-end production capacity and a shortage of high-end capacity.

At Tuesday's press conference held to announce the action plan, Chang also stated that the ministry is accelerating the revision of the country's steel capacity swap guidelines. This follows MIIT's decision in late August to suspend the current guidelines, which had been in place for over three years, as reported.

The further optimisation of the capacity swap guidelines will promote the organisational and regional structure of China's steel industry, supporting a shift towards "reducing quantity while enhancing quality" in its development, Chang commented.

Under China's previous steel capacity swap guidelines, whenever new iron- or steelmaking capacity is erected, old facilities of at least the same productive capacity in operation at the time was to be stopped and eventually scrapped. The scheme had served as an effective tool for the central government to limit the expansion of the country's steel capacity, as Mysteel Global reported, and is credited with enabling China to permanently remove over 200 million tonnes/year of outdated iron and steel capacity over 2016-2020.

Note: This article has been written in accordance with a content exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and BigMint.