Sharing the green steel premium

If you're a big brand trying to cut Scope 3 emissions, steel is one of the hardest and priciest things to fix. Clean steel from a first-of-its-kind hydrogen plant costs 50-70% more than the normal kind.

Easy move: wait for the price to drop, wait for a subsidy, hope someone upstream eats the gap. But waiting means your emissions number sits still while the reporting rules keep getting stricter.

There's a better way... When buyers and brands pay for a verified cut on a real tonne of steel, that demand pays about $US 100-200 per verified tonne of CO₂ saved, enough to cover 30-50% of the price gap on its own. You're not propping up a plant. You're buying an audit-grade emissions cut at a known price.

But inset buyers close part of the gap, not all of it. The rest still needs funding, and a green project is too big a bet for one balance sheet. At C3, we let different investors back the same project together, each taking the share that fits their risk appetite: pre-purchased credits, sustainability-linked loans, project equity and verified-credit offtake combine into one financeable deal. The price gap gets shared, not carried alone.

Learn more in our latest 2026 Sustainable Iron & Steel Outlook linkedin.com