Take a deep breath — the end of a century of coal-fired steel pollution in Hamilton is on the horizon

It's hard to imagine the Steeltown bayfront without coal piles the size of toboggan hills or towering smokestacks belching fire and steamy pollution.

The forest of fiery stacks - the highest tops Hamilton's tallest building, 44-storey Landmark Place - inspires both pride in generations of city-building steelworkers and also comparative jokes about the hellscape of Mordor in fantasy novel Lord of the Rings.

The chimneys are also a looming reminder of a steelmaking legacy that includes some of the worst air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in Ontario, thanks to a century of reliance on coal-fired technology.

But maybe not for much longer.

This year, the city's largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, vowed to end a century of dirty coal use at its bayfront operations by 2028, if not sooner - thanks in part to a $900-million assist from federal and provincial taxpayers.

Next door, residents can watch the ongoing teardown of a defunct blast furnace at neighbouring Stelco, the other major coal-user on the bayfront. The company is tight-lipped about any decarbonization" plans in its future - but documents obtained by The Spectator suggest Stelco's polluting coke ovens are on borrowed time and could even be demolished within seven years.

Dofasco's green steel" project alone is a big deal for Canada's battle against climate change.

The historic $1.8-billion transformation will fundamentally change the way we make steel," promised president Ron Bedard in February as he described plans to replace coal-fired coke ovens and blast furnaces with electric arc steelmaking and an iron-smelting facility that may eventually be powered by green hydrogen.

Dofasco is the single biggest industrial CO2 polluter in Ontario - about 4.7 million tonnes in 2019 - and accounted for close to half of all Hamilton greenhouse emissions in that year. Ending coal-fired steelmaking should slash carbon emissions from the plant by 60 per cent, or the equivalent of taking close to one million exhaust-spewing cars off the road.

But locally, the changes might be even more significant in the daily lives of Hamiltonians - especially for those trying to live and breathe in the lower city.

Oh gosh, it will be huge, a really transformational thing," said Environment Hamilton's Lynda Lukasik, who has long pushed for stricter air pollution limits for steelmakers and founded a StackWatch" team of volunteers to report pollution plumes.

This is the sort of bold move we really need," added Denis Corr, a retired Ministry of Environment manager and current expert air quality consultant who has tracked pollution in Hamilton neighbourhoods with a mobile monitor.

Corr, a past chair of Clean Air Hamilton, emphasized both air quality and industrial pollution controls have improved drastically" in Hamilton since the bad old days of the 1980s and early '90s. But levels of some carcinogenic pollutants remain too high. The primary emitters of a lot of these things would be the major steel companies."

Ending the use of coal at Dofasco - and maybe Stelco - means shuttering coke ovens and blast furnaces that belch some of the most dangerous air contaminants on the bayfront, not to mention occasional rains of black soot.

It will also kick-start a startling visual change to Hamilton's historical industrial waterfront.

Imagine the decades-old contours of bayfront coal mountains shrinking to nothing. Or the mothballing and eventual teardown of a dozen or more iconic bayfront smokestacks that currently dominate the skyline.

It will be weird, in some ways, if we see that landscape literally disappear," said Lukasik, a lifelong Hamiltonian whose father and both grandfather's worked in the steel industry.

Weird - but also necessary for the health of long-suffering residents, stressed Lukasik, whose organization recently released a special report on the urgency of transitioning to cleaner steel. Her main beef with Dofasco's project is that relief for residents remains six years away.

When you think about chronic air pollution exposure, the regular fallouts on neighbourhoods ... We know it's the coke ovens and the steelmaking furnaces that are a major source of that."

In this three-part series, The Spectator takes a deeper dive into the local air quality implications of Dofasco's decision to kick its coal habit - and the potential for Stelco to do the same - including:

• The air pollution improvements for a city that ranks as Ontario's worst hot spot for cancer-causing benzene and benzo(a)pyrene and currently has more air monitors tracking contaminants than any other city;

• Whether bayfront and beach strip residents will ever see an end to infamous black snow" that coats homes, lawn furniture and pets with coal dust and blast furnace fallout.

The Dofasco transition will help on both counts, said steel industry expert Peter Warrian - but it won't end the use of all metallurgic coal in Hamilton unless neighbouring steelmaker Stelco follows suit.

Stelco's Hamilton footprint has shrunk dramatically since its heyday in the late 1970s when it employed 26,000 workers as the city's then-largest steelmaker. (Dofasco is now the largest in the city with 4,500-plus workers.)

Today, Stelco does not actually make iron or steel in Hamilton - that primary production" all happens now at an integrated mill on Lake Erie, near Nanticoke. Hamilton's site has about 900 workers remaining and is largely devoted to steel-finishing operations like galvanizing and zinc-coating lines - but also making coke from coal.

That 83-oven Hamilton coke plant remains a major polluter - but also very important to Stelco, argued Warrian, a past chief economist for the province and former research head for the United Steel Workers. They need that material to feed their blast furnace (at Lake Erie)," he said.

Warrian said he expects the company to eventually" transition away from coal-fired technology - especially if government grants remain on offer.

That's just the way the industry is heading," he said, noting the Canadian Steel Producers Association is targeting 2050 to reach net-zero" carbon emissions. You see these big government funding announcements at Dofasco, at Algoma (a Sault Ste. Marie steelmaker), and you have to wonder, where is Stelco in this movie?"

It's hard to pin down how quickly that transition might happen at Stelco, which did not agree to interview requests for these stories or answer any questions about the fate of coal-fired facilities or any potential green steel plans.

On the one hand, Stelco recently spent close to $300 million repairing its Lake Erie coke ovens and upgrading its blast furnace into a smart" technology version that is more efficient - but still relies on coal. Given those investments, the company may balk at quickly mothballing coal-fired facilities, Warrian noted.

On the other hand, Stelco just sold all of its Hamilton property - 800 bayfront acres - to a developer that will now lease back 75 acres to the steelmaker for ongoing operations.

That deal allows steel finishing operations to continue into the next century - but The Spectator exclusively reported this month that Stelco's lease for its aging coke plant, by contrast, is supposed to end at latest by 2029. Once the lease ends, the company is required to demolish the coke battery.

A recent public filing by the company also notes Stelco expects to have to spend up to $50 million on pollution upgrades at Hamilton's coke plant by 2026 if we choose to continue to operate."

Finally, the company has registered to lobby the province about the future of its thermal processes" that include coal-fired blast furnaces and ovens.

In May, Premier Doug Ford told the Spectator that his government has had green steel" talks with Stelco - and added he is encouraging them" to look at greener electric arc steelmaking. I can't dictate to private sector companies, but I can sure encourage them," he said an election stop in Hamilton featuring Stelco's partly demolished blast furnace in the background.

Lukasik figures both steelmakers will have to go green quickly or risk being left behind" in the global shift toward low-carbon steel that is needed to help countries like Canada meet increasingly stringent carbon-cutting commitments.

She is a fan so far of Dofasco's decarbonization plan - with some very important caveats."

For one thing, what happens if pollution worsens at the steelmaker's aging coke ovens or blast furnace before 2028?

Will the company be motivated to invest in repairs, to fix problems if they know they are just going to shut down in a few years?" Lukasik asked, noting pollution leaks from coke ovens worsened in the first quarter of this year and she has reported two dark emission incidents to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks in the last three weeks.

I'm telling you now, there will be some deeply ticked off Hamiltonians out there if we end up with six straight years of horrible emissions."

At a recent community liaison meeting, Dofasco environmental head John Lundrigan stressed the company is committed to ongoing maintenance ahead of its green transition. The company also just finished an eight-year, $87-million overhaul of dozens of 140 coke ovens. The company opted not to repair some ovens, letting them go dark.

The steelmaker also hopes to bring its cleaner tech online sooner than 2028, Lundrigan said. That's a top priority."

Lukasik is also wary about the lack of public detail around the clean steel technology.

The switch to electric arc furnaces is a big win for the environment - but it will require a massive power upgrade for a plant that is already one of the city's biggest electricity users. Dofasco estimates its peak additional electricity needs could be 400 megawatts - or enough to powers tens of thousands of homes.

Lukasik said the environment could still suffer if the power problem is solved by using more fossil fuels, or even controversial small-scale nuclear reactors under study by the provincial and federal governments. The company said it is exploring all options to cover its power needs, but no decisions have been made.

Finally, Dofasco's direct reduced iron" facility - where liquid iron is extracted from ore - will rely on natural gas to start, but hydrogen in future. The latter gas is considered the future of low-carbon" steel, because using hydrogen in place of natural gas results in a release of water, rather than carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

But you still need energy to make hydrogen. Lukasik is worried the industry will default to blue" hydrogen - which is created using fossil fuels - rather than green" hydrogen, generated from renewable sources like hydropower.

It's not yet clear where Dofasco will source its hoped-for future hydrogen. But parent company ArcelorMittal is already experimenting this year with hydrogen created using water power at an iron-making facility in Quebec.

Matthew Van Dongen is a transportation and environment reporter at for The Spectator. mvandongen@thespec.com