The energy transition is not a challenge confined to mills but also an issue for steel service centre operation, says a representative of that sector.
Speaking at the MBI Infosource Stahltag event in Frankfurt on Wednesday, Sebastian Schulze of German distribution group Knauf Interfer gave an idea of new demands on service centres. “The old world of service centres was easy to oversee,” being confined to stockholding, cutting/slitting, and providing a mill’s product specification documentation, he said.
“We used to care about the grade of a product and its size measures. Now, we have to include its carbon footprint, and explain that to the customers. And, actually, we have to understand it ourselves,” Kallanish heard him say at the conference.
“The traditional product certificate from the mill is not sufficient any more, as customers increasingly ask for the content of CO2 emissions,” he noted. “Up to a year ago, we did not have that, and now the question for us is how we handle it in a systematic way.”
“The idea of service will change quite a bit, as we will have to explain a change in pricing to the customers,” Schulze continued. He cautioned that a new generation of products is coming, with surcharges that vary widely, based on a variety of methods used to calculate their carbon footprint.
Schulze said customers’ knowledge about footprints varies widely. It is relatively well-established among big customers, such as carmakers, that often have their own roadmap, but in other sectors it can be next to zero. This is a result of political guidelines for each sector, dictating whether customers have needed to worry about it so far or not, he explained. For construction, for example, carbon emission requirements will soon become more apparent, he noted.
He perceives awareness has increased relatively steeply from last year to now, and assesses the share of customers with an awareness of footprint at around 25%.
Christian Koehl Germany
