An integrative and prospective approach to regional material flow analysis: Modeling the decarbonization of the North Rhine-Westphalian steel industry

North-Rhine Westphalia is the center of the German and European steel production. Its steel industry is heavily based on the primary production route and emits up to 30 Mt CO₂ annually. One possible and increasingly prominent alternative to reduce these emissions is the hydrogen-based direct reduction. While this technology allows for a near climate-neutral production of primary steel, it poses substantial impacts on regional energy and material flows. Hence, the aim of this paper is to quantify the alterations in energy and material flows over time via integrating top-down energy and material flow models with bottom-up process models. The resulting values of emissions, energy, and material flows are then used to develop prospective scenarios that depict the requirements and consequences of potential pathways toward a climate-neutral steel production by 2045. The outcomes show that decarbonizing the North Rhine-Westphalian steel industry leads to an additional demand for renewable energies of up to 52.5 TWh per year, which represents 10% of the current electricity production in Germany. As securing the green electricity demand is a large challenge, the study also analyzes the impact of a partial recourse to natural gas as a reducing agent in combination with other measures like carbon capture and utilization/storage. The results show that such a recourse would reduce the electricity demand to 36.8 TWh. Hence, the paper illustrates relevant implications of the different scenarios, which can be used by policymakers to develop more realistic and resilient strategies for reaching carbon neutrality.