Google has agreed to buy environmental attribute certificates covering up to 91,000 metric tons of output from Stegra's first year of production at its hydrogen-based steel mill in Boden, northern Sweden. The deal, announced Thursday, channels no physical metal to the Alphabet subsidiary — Stegra will sell that steel into the European market as a standard, unlabeled product — but it defrays the cost premium of hydrogen-based steelmaking and lets Google count the associated emissions reductions toward its own sustainability targets.

The Boden facility, under construction just south of the Arctic Circle, is designed to cut steelmaking emissions by up to 95% compared with coal-based routes. It will draw on northern Sweden's hydropower and wind capacity to electrolyze hydrogen, use that gas to reduce iron ore into direct-reduced iron, and melt the iron in renewable-powered electric arc furnaces. Phase one capacity is set at 2.5 million metric tons of steel per year, ramping to 5 million metric tons at full build-out. Stegra, the Stockholm-based company formerly known as H2 Green Steel, has not confirmed a start date; it said the project timeline remains under review after a year of financial difficulties.

Google's exposure to the material stream is indirect but material. The company reported an 18% rise in annual emissions from 2024 to 2025, driven largely by steel, concrete and computing hardware consumed in data center construction. Data center developers cannot practically buy green steel directly — their operations rarely sit near hydrogen mills — so certificates offer a workaround.

"By supporting early-stage technologies like Stegra's green steel, we are helping to create a market for materials that are essential to reducing emissions," a Google spokesperson said by email. The Google deal "contributes to generating increased cash flow to Stegra's early years of operations and the ramp-up of production," the spokesperson added, according to a corrected version of the statement issued Sept. 17.

Neither Google nor Microsoft disclosed the financial value of its arrangement. Thursday's agreement is Stegra's second certificate deal: last year it signed a two-part contract with Microsoft covering both certificates and physical steel supplied to Microsoft's European data center equipment vendors.

The instrument matters because first-of-a-kind hydrogen steel plants struggle to reach bankability against cheap coal-based product. Iron and steel production accounts for roughly 9% of human-caused CO2 emissions annually, the bulk from coal-fired blast furnaces. "A hydrogen facility can cost billions of dollars, and that can be very difficult to get funding for, particularly without a guarantee that someone's going to buy your decarbonized product at a premium," said Claire Dougherty, industrial decarbonization program manager at RMI, the clean-energy think tank that has spearheaded much of the sector's certificate work. Certificates "can help to expand the demand pool and help those suppliers achieve bankable offtake," she said.

The next step is formalizing a "book and claim" market for iron and steel certificates. Earlier this month, Stegra, Electra, Charm Industrial and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials said they are developing shared standards for counting emissions reductions and for independent verification and traceability of environmental claims. The initiative builds on a framework RMI is set to unveil that lays out rules for operating a credible book-and-claim system.

"We view this as a really important next step, in terms of scaling the certificate market for low-carbon iron and steel producers," said Maressa Brennan, Electra's senior director of regulatory policy and markets. The Colorado startup, which produces iron electrochemically at near-coffee-cup temperatures, signed its own certificate deal with Meta last year. Electra plans to start operations later this year at a demonstration plant in Jefferson County, Colorado, initially producing up to 500 metric tons of high-purity iron annually, and is evaluating sites for a first commercial facility that could come online in the early 2030s.

For the certificate market to scale beyond pilot agreements, two milestones now decide the trajectory: RMI's book-and-claim framework, due within days, and Stegra's still-unconfirmed start date at Boden.