**6. Conclusions**

This paper explores pathways for deep CO2 emission cuts in the Swedish steel industry up to 2045, with respect to technological development, energy use, carbon dioxide emissions and cost over time. The alternative pathways, e.g., TGRBF with CCS and biomass, H-DR/EAF and EAF/biomass, are compared to the current (2017) Swedish steelmaking technologies.

The technological assessment has shown that in 2030, it should be reasonable to assume that CO2 emission reductions of 80% compared to current process configurations can be achieved applying TGRBF/CCS with biomass along with electric arc furnace with biomass as CO2 mitigation options. Using biomass instead of PCI for the primary steelmaking process, would result in a biomass demand from the steel industry in 2045 equal to 6% of the current total current biomass consumption in Sweden. At present, biomass is hardly used at all in the steel industry. Even though there is potential for increased utilization of biomass instead of PCI in the Swedish steel industry in the mid to long term [50], the available biomass is subject to competition, since other sectors are also aiming to increase their use of biomass to achieve their emission reduction goals.

Pathway 2 shows that electrification of primary steel production, in terms of using hydrogen as a reducing agen<sup>t</sup> in H-DR/EAF technology, can result in a 10% reduction in total Swedish carbon dioxide emissions. The main challenge of the electrification in Pathway 2 is the resulting electricity demand of almost 14 TWh in 2045.

The results from this work sugges<sup>t</sup> that the increased production of HBI pellets, as assumed in Pathway 3, can lead to reduction in CO2 emissions from the steel industry outside Sweden, assuming that the exported HBI will be converted via EAF and the receiving country has a decarbonized power sector. Such a pathway leads to new investments in Swedish steel production capacities and an additional electricity demand of 25.6 TWh (current electricity demand of steel industry is 7.4 TWh).

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.T., L.G. and F.J.; methodology: A.T., L.G. and F.J.; software, A.T.; validation: A.T.; formal analysis, A.T., I.K. and J.R.; investigation, A.T. and I.K.; resources, A.T., data curation: A.T.; writing – original draft preparation, A.T.; writing – review and editing, A.T., L.G., I.K, J.R., M.O. and F.J; visualization, A.T.; project administration, F.J. and M.O.; funding acquisition, F.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was financed by the Mistra Carbon Exit Research programme.

**Acknowledgments:** Financial support from Mistra is gratefully acknowledged.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
