An analysis of sub-sectoral level carbon budget allocation for India's iron and steel sector

Abstract

The global carbon budget, defined as the cumulative amount of permissible carbon emissions to meet the temperature targets, is widely used to study climate change. This carbon budget is rapidly decreasing, with a high probability of it getting exhausted in the coming few decades. The extensive use of non-renewable resources has resulted in a rapid depletion of the global carbon budget. Currently, there is a lack of studies assessing the long-term impact of various sectors on the rapidly decreasing global carbon budget. The recent budget estimates have further reduced by 200 GtCO2 in the past decade, creating conflicts among the nations towards getting a higher share of the remaining budget.This study focuses on allocating the global carbon budget to a sub-sectoral level for India's iron and steel sector. First, the global carbon budget is allocated using different approaches, giving India a range of carbon budgets. Further, the allocation is done to the sectoral and sub-sectoral levels to obtain the benchmark targets between 2020 and 2050 from the national carbon budget. Projections have been made for the production capacity and the expected emissions till 2050 for India's iron and steel sector using three scenarios based on specific CO2 emission reduction. The results indicate that the carbon emissions for the “specific CO2 emission stagnation” scenario for 2 °C temperature target are 66% to 726% above the benchmark carbon budget allocated to the iron and steel sector using different allocation methods. The study also shows the benchmark carbon budget of the iron and steel sector for the 2 °C, 1.7 °C, and 1.5 °C temperature targets will deplete between 2023 and 2046 for the different emission scenarios.