Making net-zero steel will take a lot of effort. The industry accounts for 8% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions — and 10% when including indirect emissions from power generation, according to the International Energy Association. Daunting? Perhaps, but reducing these emissions will take one step at a time.

TenarisSilcotub is doing just that at a steel mill in Călărași, a city in south-east Romania. The company recently launched plans to invest $21 million to build a 20 MW solar power park not far from the mill, where it produces steel bars for exporting to USA.

Tenaris will finance 70% of the investment, while the rest will come from the European Union through its National Recovery and Resilience Plan, a sign of the importance that the continent is putting on achieving sustainability.

The park of photovoltaic panels will generate electricity for running the mill, starting at the end of this year.

“The construction of this photovoltaic park will bring its contribution to Tenaris’s decarbonization efforts in Romania, aligning with the company’s goal to decrease its CO2 emissions intensity per ton of steel by 30% by 2030,” said Mihaela Popescu, President of East Europe, North Sea & Sub-Saharan Africa.

This is the latest effort to make TenarisSilcotub’s operations more sustainable.

The sustainability efforts are spreading across Tenaris’s global operations, including a photovoltaic power generation project in China and a wind farm in Argentina. With global demand for steel expected to rise by a third by 2050, the industry’s carbon emissions could continue to rise unless more things are done to reduce them. By turning to the sun to run operations, this is ushering in a new era of more sustainable steel production.