Fig. 1: Geographical distribution of current unit production cost and capacity of global iron and steel plants.

a–f, Global plants producing BF iron (a), BF–BOF steel (b), BF–OHF steel (c), DRI iron (d), DRI–EAF steel (e) and Scrap–EAF steel (f). n denotes the number of plants shown in each panel. Black dashed lines and accompanying cost annotations indicate the global capacity-weighted average costs for each processing route. g–i, Violin plots of BF–BOF (g), DRI–EAF (h) and Scrap–EAF (i) costs in key regions. Dark red points (\({\widehat{\mu }}_{{\rm{median}}}\)) denote the regional median costs, and labels indicate plants with the highest and lowest costs. CIS refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States. j, Geographical distribution of global steel plants with cost and capacity information. Unit production costs include operating and capital components, and are expressed as US$ t⁻¹ steel (US dollars per tonne of crude steel) or US$ t⁻¹ iron (US dollars per tonne of iron). Base map from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ (public domain).