Kamal Ghorui
There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not involve lying. It involves announcing the right destination, then doing nothing meaningful to get there, and treating the announcement as the work itself.
The first SteelWatch Corporate Scorecard, released this week, has put numbers to that behaviour across 18 of the world’s major steelmakers. The results are illuminating, not because they reveal a surprise, but because they make legible what was always structurally visible to anyone paying attention.
Not a single company scored above 50 out of 100 on transition readiness. The median score is 27. The average score on scaling green iron and renewable energy is less than one point out of 25. Every company assessed currently runs coal-based blast furnaces. Every company assessed scores zero on green iron consumption. Several do not even have reportable data on renewable energy use.
And yet, most of these companies have published net zero targets.
This is the core of what the scorecard makes undeniable: a net zero target, stated with sincerity and timed for 2050, is compatible with doing almost nothing structurally today. The goal and the architecture required to reach it can exist in complete separation, housed in the same annual report, without contradiction, because no one was previously measuring the distance between them.
The SteelWatch methodology is worth understanding precisely because it refuses the usual accounting flattery. Half the score is based on actual progress exiting coal-based production and scaling near-zero-emission iron. Not on targets. Not on emissions intensity ratios, which can improve as production declines rather than as technology changes. On the structural decisions that determine what a company’s asset base looks like in 2035, and whether those assets are compatible with a decarbonised sector or not. ArcelorMittal, for instance, is ranked third overall, but its score reflects, in part, production declines rather than genuine technological transition. It has the largest blast furnace fleet among all 18 companies assessed and did not score a passing mark in any of the five transition categories.
The steel sector matters for a reason beyond its own footprint. It accounts for roughly a tenth of global CO2 emissions. But more than that, it is a sector where the capital intensity and longevity of assets means that decisions made this decade will lock in emissions trajectories for the next three. A blast furnace built or relined today does not retire in five years. It runs for decades. Which means the transition readiness of a steelmaker is not an abstract ESG metric. It is a question of physical infrastructure, and whether that infrastructure is being reshaped in time.
The two companies that separate themselves from the rest, SSAB of Sweden and thyssenkrupp of Germany, scoring 46.2 and 41.9 respectively, are not there because they have arrived. They are there because they have made the structural commitments that the others have deferred: retirement plans for blast furnace capacity, no reinvestment in coal-based assets, and credible pathways toward green iron. The distance between them and the rest of the field is instructive. It is not primarily a distance in ambition. It is a distance in structural decision-making.
The worst performers, Nippon Steel at 16.8 and HBIS at 8.3, illustrate the other end of this logic. Nippon Steel has a net zero target. It has also continued its structural reliance on coal-based blast furnaces and expanded its global asset base, including into the United States and India, without sufficient disclosure of the emissions responsibilities that expansion brings. A net zero target at headquarters does not automatically apply to overseas acquisitions made with coal-heavy operating models. That gap, between the stated destination and the physical reality of what is being built and bought, is where transition readiness actually lives.
This matters beyond the steel sector because the pattern is not unique to it. Across heavy industry, the last decade has produced an extraordinary proliferation of net zero commitments. The commitments are real in the sense that they were made. What has not followed, in most cases, is the parallel reconfiguration of assets, capital allocation, and supply chain decisions that would make them credible. Target-setting has become, in effect, a substitute for transition planning rather than an expression of it.
The SteelWatch scorecard is useful because it creates accountability architecture around a distinction that has been too easy to blur. A company that has set a 2050 net zero target but is still relining blast furnaces and has no green iron in its supply chain is not a company in transition. It is a company with a target. These are different things, and the difference is measurable.
What the scorecard does, and what this kind of tracking will increasingly do across sectors, is make the space between announcement and action visible, year on year. Scores are expected to rise as companies move. The question is which ones will move structurally, and which ones will continue optimising the language of their targets while the assets underneath remain unchanged.
The answer, for most of the 18 companies assessed, is not yet determined. But the clock embedded in those blast furnaces is not waiting for the language to improve.
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