Rio Tinto has commissioned a pilot carbon capture unit at Shougang Group's Jingtang steel production base in China, designed to treat 3,000 cubic metres of blast furnace gas per hour and capture up to 10,000 metric tonnes of CO2 a year during the test phase.

The Jingtang plant is the first operating deliverable under a memorandum of understanding Rio Tinto and Shougang signed in 2022 to co-develop low-carbon technologies for ironmaking and steelmaking. Both companies have framed the work as a pre-commercial risk-sharing arrangement rather than a procurement contract.

Why a mining major is testing on a Chinese blast furnace

Integrated steel production still runs through the blast furnace route. Blast furnaces account for the bulk of Scope 1 emissions inside a steelworks and the largest share of upstream Scope 3 emissions tied to iron ore shipments. As steel buyers tighten procurement specifications, miners face a downstream carbon bill they cannot pass through.

Capturing CO2 directly from blast furnace off-gas is the most workable near-term lever, even as direct reduced iron and green-hydrogen pathways attract most of the policy funding. The Jingtang trial gives Rio Tinto and Shougang operating data on a live integrated mill rather than a bench-scale rig, which both companies need to underwrite any future retrofit decision.

What the pilot will measure

Engineers will record solvent performance, energy draw and gas pre-treatment requirements on raw blast furnace off-gas — the dirtiest stream on a steel site. Most published CCUS data comes from cleaned syngas or from post-combustion flue gas, not from raw top-gas with its dust and tars.

Operating on raw gas, rather than conditioned syngas, tests whether retrofit economics hold up at commercial scale. The trial will also measure how existing utilities — steam, power, cooling water — absorb the parasitic energy load a capture unit imposes. Steel mills considering retrofits will price that load before ordering equipment, which makes the parasitic penalty the single most-watched number coming out of the campaign.

Built capacity versus announced project status

The 10,000-tonne-per-year figure is the engineering nameplate for the test campaign, not commercial throughput. Rio Tinto has described the unit as a pilot; the company has not disclosed a date for scale-up, a CAPEX figure, or a tonnage target at commercial size.

A full-scale retrofit at any integrated steelworks would still cover only a fraction of site emissions. That arithmetic frames the case for combined capture-plus-DRI pathways over the next decade and sets the realistic ceiling on what point-source CCUS can deliver inside a single plant.

What happens next

The partners will now run the test campaign and publish operating data on solvent stability, energy penalty and gas-handling performance. The next milestone is a documented go-or-no-go decision on a front-end engineering design study for a commercial CCUS unit at Jingtang.

Rio Tinto has tied the work to its Scope 3 customer engagement programme and to its decarbonisation roadmap. The 2022 MOU does not bind either party to a commercial build, and neither company has published a timeline for that next step. Watch the operating data release from Jingtang and any subsequent FEED announcement — those two markers decide whether the 3,000-cubic-metre pilot becomes the seed of a commercial unit, or stays a research line item.