Tata Steel is building a new mathematical framework to measure and account for the carbon emissions and sustainability impacts of steel production across the entire life cycle of its products. The problem is that existing methods for assessing greenhouse gas emissions and broader sustainability criteria are fragmented and inconsistent. No single approach works well across all sectors of the steel industry, making it difficult for companies like Tata Steel to compare results, comply with disclosure requirements, or make credible decarbonisation claims. The research aims to develop a harmonised, whole-life-cycle methodology that is robust, interoperable, and tailored specifically to steel. If successful, the framework will give Tata Steel—and potentially the wider industry—a standardised way to account for emissions over time, including the complex effects of carbon capture and utilisation products with different lifespans. It will also incorporate social factors such as cost, public acceptability, and the social impacts of steel use. The result could be more credible sustainability reporting, better-informed policy decisions, and clearer pathways for industrial decarbonisation. This is applied research with a direct industrial partner, designed for practical implementation.
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The requirement to assess, account for, and disclose carbon / greenhouse gas emissions and other broader sustainability criteria is increasingly a factor in many aspects relating directly to Tata Steel's operations, products & markets and policy related activities. Although there are many broad methods, none are ideal and no one method is working well across all sectors of industry, leading to significant challenges. The objectives of the PhD are: - To deepen the understanding of and influence the development of relevant methodologies for the assessment of sustainability criteria, in particular related to industrial decarbonisation. - To ensure such approaches are robust and credible, incorporating a whole life cycle approach and, to the greatest extent possible, harmonised and interoperable between various relevant initiatives. - To build and create appropriate spatial and temporal models for the steel industry, including, e.g.: Temporal modelling in sustainability assessment, including exploring and identifying the role of credit-based methodologies in LCA as we approach 2050; o temporal modelling for the circular economy within the steel industry, for example, how the benefits/impacts of long and short lifetime CCU products can be accounted for. - Create case studies including the social aspect of steel use, uptake, cost, and wider acceptability of use and production etc - exploring social LCA or a wider social science-based embedding technique. - Create a working framework for Tata Steel with fully harmonized case studies across the industry
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