The iron and steel industry (ISI) plays a significant role in carbon emissions, contributing approximately 15% of the nation’s total emissions in China. Transitioning to low-carbon practices is crucial for achieving the country’s carbon neutrality goals. This paper reviews the current state of China’s ISI and assesses the feasibility of various decarbonization technologies, including hydrogen utilization, biomass substitution, zero-carbon electricity, Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), as well as their combinations. The blast furnace–basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) process currently dominates the industry with an overwhelming share of around 90%, presenting significant challenges for decarbonization. In contrast, the Direct Reduced Iron–Electric Arc Furnace (DRI-EAF) process is still at the demonstration project stage, but it is rapidly growing and shows great potential for achieving net-zero emissions. Electric arc furnaces (EAFs) that use scrap steel account for about 9% of production and have the lowest energy consumption. However, their production capacity is limited by the availability of scrap steel. Among numerous options, blue hydrogen, carbon-neutral biomass, and CCUS technologies have relatively low costs and high technological maturity. Nevertheless, no single technology can currently achieve deep decarbonization while significantly reducing costs. The nation needs to select the most suitable decarbonization strategies based on geographical location, infrastructure, and economic conditions. The government should enact corresponding policies, provide economic incentives, and ensure mitigation of the environmental and social impacts during the decarbonization transition.

The shortage of urban water caused by CCS retrofitting over coal-fired power plants has become an emerging issue, especially in China where water resources are scarce. In this study, we quantified the impact of CCS retrofitting on water resources and analyzed the increased water pressures due to CCS retrofits in 234 cities of China. We identified 54 cities with 165 power plants that would face water pressure due to CCS retrofitting for achieving 2 °C targets. The results show that the average water withdrawal and water consumption of power plants in 234 cities would increase by 1.63 times and 1.49 times, respectively, involving 480 million people in China. The ratio of freshwater withdrawal to available water (WTA) and the ratio of freshwater consumption to available water (CTA) at the city-level increased by 0.2 and 0.06 under 2 °C constraints respectively, involving a population of 84 million people. Moreover, CO₂-EWR technology does not provide relief from urban water stress. This paper assesses the water demand for carbon capture technologies and provides a basis for siting future large-scale deployment of carbon capture technologies in China.

The Quick Access Recorder (QAR), as an onboard device used for monitoring and recording flight parameters, has been extensively installed on various types of aircraft. Recently, there has been a significant focus on studying the typical flight safety event of runway excursions based on QAR data. However, there is limited research that combines the analysis of runway excursion risks with flight operations, and there is also a scarcity of studies that divide the investigation of the landing phase into multiple key stages. In this paper, we propose a comparative analysis of operational characteristics and risks associated with runway excursions from the perspective of operational styles. A total of 2087 flights were classified on the basis of touchdown distance, taxiing distance, and magnetic heading changes and were divided into three styles based on these indicators. Subsequently, we analyze flight operations and attitudes at five key stages: runway threshold, flare, speed brake deployment, touchdown, and reverse thrust activation. Furthermore, we employ the selection criteria of pilot proficiency levels to filter out standard operational curves. The curve similarity is used to compare the difference between the actual operating curves and the standard curves. Finally, we employ typical correlation analysis to explore the relationship between touchdown distance and operational variances. The findings indicate that Style 1 pilots exhibit the lowest probability of runway excursions, yet their maneuvers potentially elevate the risk of hard landing events.