The State Council's "Air Quality Improvement Action Plan" aims the proportion of EF process steel production should reach 15% by 2025

The State Council's notice on November 30th for the "Air Quality Improvement Action Plan" stressed strong restrictions on new projects that are energy-intensive, highly polluting, and substandard. New and expansion or renovation projects must strictly follow national plans, policies, environmental controls, EIAs, energy reviews, capacity rules, pollutant limits, emission cuts, and carbon peak goals, prioritizing clean transport. Projects must retire old capacity and related facilities before starting new production, with a ban on increasing steel capacity. The plan promotes an integrated layout of steel, coking, and sintering operations, significantly reducing the number of independent coking, sintering, pelletizing, and hot rolling enterprises and processes, and phasing out outdated coal washing and selection capacities. Moreover, there is an orderly guidance for the transition from blast furnace-converter long-process steelmaking to electric furnace steelmaking. By 2025, the share of EF steel steelmaking should hit 15%. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area will keep coking capacity aligned with steel output, targeting a coking capacity/BF steelmaking capacity ratio of 0.4.