Design, development and implementation of an automatic carbon footprint evaluation algorithm for semi-finished products in the steelmaking industry

Climate change is an undeniable phenomenon that continues to raise concerns. The steelmaking industry is one of the major contributors to climate change, therefore emphasizing the importance of decarbonizing its processes. The defined concept of Green Steel by European Commission enforces studies and strategies for the quantification of the carbon footprint focusing on the reduction of the processes emissions and to achieve the net-zero objectives. According to the Life Cycle Assessment and protocol described in ISO 14040 family and Greenhouse Gas Emission quantification and reporting in ISO 14060 family and together with Danieli Automation S.p.A. experience, the purpose of this thesis is to design a novel strategy to quantify the emissions and environmental impact of a semi-finished product in a steel making scenario. The Sustainability market offers various software for quantifying the emissions and environmental impacts of products. However, these tools have certain limitations, such as their inability to consider the dynamics of production data, variations in life cycle inventory, and the utilization of different datasets, which leads to inaccurate results. Therefore, the design and development of a customized automated carbon footprint calculation procedure could add robustness to the Green Steel production assessment. This work presents the algorithm and the methodology developed for automating the calculation of carbon footprints merging data coming from different plant sources. The entire procedure has been tested as a proof of concept for a confidential case study. After outlining the general characteristics of the algorithm, the case study was implemented and simulated in a dedicated development environment. The carbon footprint results related to steel production were analyzed over a three-month period as an offline feasibility of emissions monitoring.