Interview

Bengochea: "2025 was a record year for environmental investments at Tenaris"

Carolina Bengochea, Tenaris’s Environment Director, reviews progress on the energy transition, from renewable energy investments and energy efficiency gains to advances in scrap management, while addressing the challenge of sustaining an ambitious environmental agenda in a more pragmatic global context.

#15-June 2026
"By 2025, Tenaris had already achieved a 19% reduction in emissions compared to its 2018 baseline. The company is now 11 percentage points away from its 2030 target," says Carolina Bengochea, Tenaris’s Environment Director.

In recent years, Tenaris launched a very concrete agenda of projects linked to the energy transition. Which would you highlight today as the most relevant, and what is their current status?

The first action we implemented was to gradually increase the use of scrap in our electric furnaces while reducing the use of pig iron, which has a high impact on Scope 3 — that is, the indirect emissions associated with the value chain. Recycling scrap reduces the use of virgin raw materials, which, therefore, generates higher emissions. This action had a rapid and very significant impact on our emissions intensity.

Investments in renewable energy for electricity generation have been very significant. We went from 0% to 25% of total electricity consumption in 2025. The wind farms in Argentina are the largest projects, including in terms of investment. The La Rinconada wind farm in Olavarría will only show its full impact in 2026, as it was commissioned in October 2025. But we also have the Călărași solar park in Romania, which also started operating in 2025; the Qingdao solar park in China, where more than 2,200 photovoltaic panels were installed at our tube plant; and the ones in Italy (Arcore and Sabbio), which will surely come online in the first half of 2026.

In our pipeline, we have additional renewable projects in Cartagena, Colombia, and other parks in Italy, under Italy's regulatory framework to promote renewable development. So I believe Tenaris's renewable energy agenda has been — and will continue to be — important. It also makes sense for Tenaris because we manufacture steel tubes in electric furnaces, which makes us electricity-intensive.

There are also the energy efficiency initiatives, which are very important because they are part of our industrial culture. Efficiency is not only important in energy terms, but also in processes and in the use of materials. It is important to understand that efficiency improvements are linked to improvements in emissions.

What emissions reduction figure did Tenaris achieve in 2025?

In 2025, we achieved a 19% reduction in intensity compared to our 2018 baseline. We still need an additional 11% to reach the target we committed to for 2030. Additionally, 2025 was a record year for environmental investments at Tenaris, driven mainly by the second wind farm in Argentina, the solar park in Romania, and the investments related to improvements in scrap management.

The energy transition is neither easy nor cheap. Why is it so difficult to make progress?

The first thing one can say — and it is evident in the strategies of different companies — is that there is no single solution that works for everyone or that can be applied equally across all regions and all sites. That is the first reality: it is long, complicated, and you cannot replicate it exactly from one place to another. For example, in the case of renewables, you cannot install solar or wind farms just anywhere; they need to be located where generation is efficient and where there is transport infrastructure, for instance. Solutions are local because they depend on the context, the processes involved, the available energy, and the costs in each region.

We evaluate and monitor other technologies and alternatives as they evolve, such as hydrogen and carbon capture, which sound interesting. However, we believe they are still some years away from being technically and commercially available and competitive.

Can we speak of a global slowdown in the energy transition? How is this reflected in decision-making within Tenaris?

I would not say it has slowed down, but rather that there is a greater dose of pragmatism. We cannot ignore that the United States' withdrawal from global climate agreements and changes to its own regulations have implications for both American companies and the global agenda.

But it is not just that. Today, the environmental or climate change component in the energy discussion has taken a step back on the agenda because energy availability and affordability have gained greater relevance. These are aspects that have a short-term impact; the current situation shows that energy security is not guaranteed for everyone and is being exacerbated by rising demand in certain regions, driven by data center consumption. A dose of global pragmatism has prevailed, especially since last year. Previously, there was a boom of expectations about what the energy transition would look like, how fast it would move, and how it would reach all regions; now it is acknowledged — and this was widely discussed at CERAWeek — that energy must be available and affordable.

Countries with fewer available energy resources must seek energy sources that best suit them to ensure the development of their communities. For years, the focus was on sustainability, assuming that availability and affordability were guaranteed. After the war in Ukraine, it became clear that they were not.

When you talk to representatives of different companies, the decarbonization agenda continues — perhaps with different timelines and a more realistic outlook — but the issue does not disappear from the agenda. As for Tenaris, our 2030 target remains the same as the one we had defined. It has not changed.

Initiatives such as the publication of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) aim at greater transparency. What value do these tools have today for customers and for internal management?

We redefined the strategy somewhat. An EPD is an assessment of the environmental impacts throughout a product's life cycle. At one point, we had launched several of these initiatives; we then decided to redefine the strategy and consolidate them into a single initiative: an EPD for seamless tubes, based on the production average across many Tenaris plants. We completed that certification in 2025. It has value from a transparency standpoint and allows us to demonstrate to our customers and other stakeholders that we have a transparent, verified, standardized, and comparable method to calculate the environmental impacts of our product. It is a tool for differentiation. The value that customers place on it varies: it is probably more appreciated in the European market than in the American one.

Moreover, this is not something exclusive to us. We see that many of our steel suppliers, as well as some competitors, are going through the same process. It is a market trend and a good exercise for understanding how a product performs in environmental terms throughout its life cycle.

In a context of increasing regulatory demands, market pressure, and economic constraints, what are the main challenges in sustaining an ambitious environmental agenda without losing industrial competitiveness?

To avoid losing industrial competitiveness, each project must be evaluated technically, as we have always done. At Tenaris, we have incorporated that evaluation into our project analysis process: beyond the environmental benefit, we must assess whether a project will generate sufficient economic benefits to support it. This is not something that has changed with the current pragmatism; we have always evaluated projects with the same criteria.

Perhaps today we are more cautious when evaluating projects involving technologies that are not yet sufficiently proven. We have invested a great deal of time analyzing things that, in the end, were not convincing. You have to wait for the technology to evolve. Of course, when regulatory compliance is involved, the project takes its usual priority, because you cannot ask for an economic contribution for something that must be done under a regulatory obligation. And that will continue to follow its usual course.

Looking ahead, in which areas or projects will Tenaris focus its next efforts in terms of energy transition and environmental sustainability?

I do not see actions that are fundamentally different from what we have done so far. The renewable projects in the pipeline will continue, as will the work with our suppliers to understand their targets, the efficiency improvement initiatives, and scrap control and quality initiatives. We also have areas for improvement that do not always require investment: often, it is about improving process governance, specific treatments, or control systems. They may not require investment, but rather an improvement in operational and maintenance practices that ensures system reliability. And that applies to many environmental aspects — that is where future actions should be focused.

 

 

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