For more than 10 years Wenjing has been helping the metals industry reduce emissions. Her research into solutions for steel and other metals producers was also informed by her PhD, Decarbonization of stainless steel production through alloy solutions, which she completed through Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, in 2023. With that concentrated research fresh in her mind, Wenjing was eager to blend her decade of experience with the cradle-to-cradle process control capabilities of a cutting-edge technology provider.
She joined ABB in Metals Business Line in February 2024 because ABB, as a global supplier of integrated automation, electrification and digital solutions, is in a unique position to drive sustainability in the steel and metals industries. “Producers need to invest in sustainability solutions that also support increased profitability,” she says.
Wenjing is attracted to ABB “because of its alignment with the ongoing energy transition”. She highlights that ABB’s values and comprehensive solutions ”have the potential to empower metal producers to optimize operations and processes and thereby achieve sustainability goals throughout the entire value chain.”
ABB’s commitment to sustainability is far-reaching and based around three pillars:
1) Enabling a low-carbon society: ABB’s technologies avoid and reduce emissions — an important consideration for steel manufacturers who provide an essential economic building block for a global society, says Wenjing.
2) Preserving resources: Steel is already a contributor to the circular economy, with its high recyclability providing a source of raw materials for electric arc furnaces producing new steel. Wenjing brings strong expertise in resource effectiveness to the collective knowledge of the ABB in metals team. ABB’s own circularity approach supports its customers in their sustainability commitments with retrofit, take-back and recycling solutions that extend or give a second life to its products.
3) Promoting social progress: ABB works with partners, suppliers and communities to promote respect for human rights and dignity throughout its sphere of influence, and provide a safe and inclusive working environment for its employees.
In the race to decarbonize, ABB’s commitment includes reducing or compensating for Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions to achieve carbon neutrality in its own operations by 2030.
As industries also begin to unpick the intricacies of Scope 3 emissions — those not within an organization’s control but nonetheless impacting its emissions profile — ABB is committed to collaborating with upstream suppliers, downstream customers and policymakers to recognize opportunities to more rapidly reduce emissions.
Wenjing cites the digital solution, ABB Ability™ Smart Melt Shop™ as a breakthrough in reducing emissions from processes that have been largely unchanged for decades. The smart melt shop solution uses a variety of sensors to precisely track and then synchronize crane and ladle movements. “This increases productivity, and lowers carbon emissions by between 800-2,800 tons per year for a plant with annual steel production of 4 million tons,” she says.
Another example of transformative ABB technology says Wenjing, is ABB’s electromagnetic stirring technology ArcSave®: “The solution helps steel customers decrease their energy and material use — maximizing yield from feedstock, and reducing emissions from Scopes 1, 2 and 3.”
As part of ABB’s team of experts, Wenjing is considering exactly how to bring materials science knowledge and engineering expertise to bear in assisting operators to make the most profitable and sustainable decisions when sourcing and processing materials — maximizing what’s known as their value-in-use. “Steel plant procurement managers may at times prioritize low-priced scrap and iron ore to reduce raw material costs,” she says. But from a process engineer’s perspective, cheap materials don't necessarily equal cost effectiveness in steelmaking operations.
“For instance,” she explains, "lower priced materials may include steel scrap with high levels of trace elements such as copper, or iron ore with a high concentration of gangue.” Using these materials may result in more costly consequences: such as extended tap-to-tap times; increased energy use and therefore higher carbon emissions; and the consumption of other materials due to the presence of impurities and oxides in the steel melt.” As the industry increases its use of steel scrap and direct-reduced iron, value-in-use considerations are becoming more significant to both carbon accounting and a company’s bottom line.
“My primary role within the ABB team,” says Wenjing, “is to assist in identifying opportunities and developing products and solutions that we can offer, which contribute to the sustainability targets of steel and other metal industries.”
Wenjing’s big-picture focus leads her to consider the decarbonization of steel throughout its life cycle. “Achieving profitable sustainability requires not only internal collaboration, but also external partnerships,” she says. ABB works with companies upstream from steel producers, which may, for example, be involved in the mining and beneficiation of ores, and with alloy manufacturers (aluminum, copper, silicon), to boost efficiencies while reducing fossil fuel use. This in turn impacts the overall sustainability of steel producers, as they work across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 to minimize their carbon footprint.
Downstream, cooperation with the manufacturers of final steel products can help promote the future use of recycled steel in various industries. Constant improvement in product design can enable better disassembly of metal components, further enhancing the sorting and recycling of steel scrap and its value in subsequent lifecycles. “People are still used to focusing solely on their own performance,” says Wenjing, “but we really need to collaborate across boundaries, and that takes time.”
Primary alloys can also have a significant impact on the carbon footprint of metals. For example, Wenjing says Europe currently has “a very high — 70-80% — recycling rate for austenitic stainless steel scrap, but the recycling rate of ferritic stainless steel scrap is much lower,” due to the mixed material flows of ferritic stainless steel in carbon steel flow during recycling using magnetic separation. “That means some alloy elements are lost from the mass flow of stainless steelmaking,” explains Wenjing. “Therefore, to create the next generation of stainless steel, we need to add more primary alloys, which has a significant negative impact on both the cost and carbon footprint of the steel.”
Wenjing recalls her early attraction to engineering; as a girl she was naturally curious and drawn to problem solving. “I still ask a lot of questions,” she says of her desire to unravel new challenges and understand the synergies that can be achieved in applying science and integrated technologies to the needs of individual metals businesses.
At ABB, she communicates with a spectrum of customer employees, from R&D departments to procurement managers, from operations teams to those responsible for sustainability.
She says she has learned from experience to express her convictions, and powerfully advocate for important changes that will improve outcomes for customers, both in terms of productivity and carbon accounting. She likes to put in the effort that helps customers see the value of tried and tested ideas, and also the rewards of frontier thinking.
Every market presents opportunities to evolve towards greater emissions reduction and cost efficiencies.
Sweden, which produces just 0.03% of the global steel market, has been outstanding for demonstrating, via the HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Iron-making Technology) initiative, that green steel can be realized. By piloting the removal of fossil-fuel use in the output of state-owned iron ore miner LKAB, state-owned energy company Vattenfall and steelmaker SSAB, HYBRIT delivered the first shipment of fossil-free steel to Volvo Group in mid-2021. ABB provided a full electrification and automation package for the project. Building on this experience, SSAB expects to begin industrial-scale production of green steel to meet growing global demand, in 2026.
China, the world's largest steel producer, is dominated by BF-BOF (blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace) steelmaking. In ABB’s report, What does the journey to fossil-free steel look like? market analyst Chen Ran of consultancy gongkong says digitalization will play a crucial role in the developmental pathway for green steel in China, and the completion early in 2024 of Baowu Group’s one-million-ton hydrogen-ready Direct Reduced Iron facility at Baosteel Zhanjiang exemplifies the trend of significant investment in new steelmaking technologies.
India, as the world’s second-largest steel producer, and with a steel sector projected to increase threefold by 2050, acknowledges that the primary route to replace its aging and often inefficient fleet of blast furnaces, will be hydrogen direct reduction, which it expects to be able to harness at scale from the 2030s.
Wenjing enjoys working “in this dynamic environment” and helping metals customers to transition at a pace that suits their current steelmaking infrastructure. She says a great deal can be achieved to reduce both costs and carbon emissions through taking a step-by-step approach, and particularly by deploying digital solutions that may begin by increasing the uptime of equipment and improving productivity, leading to capacity for autonomous operations.