Dempsey Quoted in S&P Global

Steps to measure the emissions intensity of US industrial products should help domestic steelmakers differentiate from competitors, a trade industry representative said.

The US Energy Department rolled out a pilot project Sept. 25 to measure the greenhouse gas intensity of certain industrial products, including steel. The Biden administration has sought to tackle steel emissions as part of a wider effort to increase the US industrial base in a climate friendly way.

The pilot program is a step toward assessing the environmental footprint of industrial products and promoting the output of domestic producers, said Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute.

“We need a trade policy that ensures that all of the efforts being made domestically to invest in all this much cleaner production, which is expensive, is not undercut by imports of much dirtier but much cheaper steel from abroad,” Dempsey told S&P Global Commodity Insights. “For that, we really need to have measurements on the average emissions intensity of the full range of steel products made in the US as a baseline to compare to the emissions intensity of steel products coming from overseas.”

Measuring average emissions would open the door to establishing a “border fee” that accounts for the difference in emissions intensity between domestic products and imports “so that the dirty but cheap imports do not undercut the domestic product,” Dempsey added.

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