The steel industry accounts for 5% of the world's total energy consumption and contributes 6% of the world's anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. The control of CO₂ emissions has become increasingly stringent in various countries. The most advanced CO₂ emission reduction technology in the steel industry has reached a bottleneck; therefore, many countries have begun developing breakthrough CO₂ emission reduction technologies to cope with the current global climate change. Blast furnace (BF) ironmaking is the key production process in steel manufacturing. The development of low-carbon ironmaking technology based on the BF is an effective way to realize green evolvement of iron and steel industry. The current hot technologies of low-carbon BF ironmaking and innovative low-carbon BF ironmaking processes of the steel industry in various countries (including Europe, USA, Japan, etc.) are summarized in this paper; in addition, new ideas for China's steel industry to reduce CO₂ emissions are provided.

The global warming promotes the steel industry to replace part of coke by injecting hydrogen-rich fuel into the blast furnace to reduce CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. In this paper, the injected hydrogen-rich fuels and effects of hydrogen-rich smelting on burden reduction and property evolution were introduced, and the hot events related to hydrogen metallurgy were summarized. Increasing hydrogen content changes the thermodynamic and kinetic conditions of chemical reactions, changing the reduction behaviour of iron oxides and affecting the burden properties evolution and soft melting behaviour. Correspondingly the coke solution loss alters due to more H₂O existence. In addition, the temperature and gas flow distribution are altered, affecting the iron oxide reduction rate and efficiency of blast furnace operation process. At present, some hydrogen metallurgy projects have been launched, making expected progress, which provides reference and thinking for the large-scale industrial application of hydrogen in blast furnace.

The recent progress and development of ironmaking in China as of 2019 was introduced. China has achieved a remarkable progress in eliminating outdated production capacity of steel industry, accomplishing the upper limit target ahead of schedule to reduce production capacity by 150 million tons during the thirteenth Five-Year plan. The blast furnaces are gradually forming a four-element burden structure of “sinter+pellet+lump+scrap”, adapting to the increase of scrap supply in society. Large-scale blast furnaces has been the development trend, 25 blast furnaces with inner volume exceeding 4000 m3 are in operation by now. In order to cope with the environmental protection policy and benefit from the sufficient supply of steel, the direct reduction process has gained a booming development opportunity in China. Although the smelting reduction has formed a certain scale in China, it still cannot compete with blast furnace ironmaking process in terms of energy utilization efficiency.