"Our carbon dioxide emissions are already below the global industry average of 2.2 tonnes per tonne of steel. But now we have set a target to reduce it to 1.8 tonnes by 2012. The next target is to bring it further down to 1.5 tonnes by 2020," Tata Steel Managing Director H.M. Nerurkar said at a function here.
However, bringing it down up to 1.7 tonnes per tonne of steel would not be much of a problem, it could be difficult to go below that, Nerurkar said. He was speaking on The Steel Sector: Initiatives for Global Leadership at the CII-organised National Conference of Leadership.
"There is no clear assurance that we can reach 1.5 (tonnes)," he said.
Nerurkar also hinted at a possible upward revision of steel prices.
"What goes down has to go up," he said when asked to comment on a Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) top official's reported assertion of a price increase from January.
But Nerurkar refused to speak any further on the matter.
After seeing a price fall by about $100-150 a tonne to $400 a tonne, global steel prices have increased by about $50 a tonne in past two months due to rise in demand.
Turning to Tata Steel's European acquisition Corus, he said it was expecting more orders for infrastructure projects after bagging railway orders in France and Germany.
He said steel demand was going down in Europe as the manufacturing industry was neglected in most of the countries of the continent.