Google is buying green steel's certificates, not its steel

Google said on Thursday it has signed an agreement with Stegra, the Swedish company building a green-hydrogen steel plant in Boden, to receive environmental attribute certificates (EACs) from up to 91,000 metric tons of steel produced in the plant's first year. Stegra published its own release the same morning, adding that there is "an ambition to add more volumes over the length of the agreement." Neither company disclosed a price, the length of the agreement, or a date for the start of commercial production.

What Google is actually buying

Not steel. Stegra's announcement is unusually direct about the mechanism, which it names: book and claim. The environmental attributes are separated from the physical product and sold on their own, which is what lets a buyer that cannot physically source a scarce material still pay for its production.

The physical steel is delivered as steel without the environmental attributes, which are delivered separately through EACs. […] To ensure there is no double counting of emission avoidance, the buyer of the physical steel will be obliged to commit to not make any green claims.

Which steel carries the attributes matters too. Stegra says it applies book and claim to its non-prime steel — material that comes off the same hydrogen-based line but does not meet prime specification — and notes that the non-prime share is larger when a mill is new. The certificates Google is buying are therefore attached, by design, to the part of early output that is hardest to sell at a premium.

The process behind the certificates

Conventional steelmaking uses coal to strip oxygen from iron ore. Stegra's plant uses renewable electricity to make hydrogen, then reacts the hydrogen with iron ore to produce iron. Stegra estimates that removing coal cuts emissions by up to 95% against traditional blast furnace manufacturing, and Google says the steel is designed to meet the International Energy Agency's definition of near-zero emissions steel production.

Both figures come from the companies; the plant is still ramping, and the deal is explicitly about funding that ramp. Google's release says the purchase "contributes to generating increased cash flow to Stegra's early years of operations," and Stegra CEO Henrik Henriksson framed Google's role as supporting "our first years of operations in this way."

Why a data center operator is in the steel market

Most of the argument about the AI buildout's footprint is an argument about electricity: power purchase agreements, nuclear restarts, interconnection queues, tokens per watt. Embodied carbon is the other half of the ledger — the emissions already spent producing the concrete and steel of a building before a single rack draws power. A clean-energy contract does nothing about it.

Google puts a number on the potential: it estimates that low-carbon building materials can reduce the embodied carbon emissions of data center infrastructure by up to 40%, and says that in 2025 it used low-carbon concrete, steel, or both across more than 20 construction projects. That 40% describes the materials strategy in aggregate, not this agreement, and Google did not say how much steel its own construction consumes in a year.

For Google the structure is a repeat rather than a departure. Adam Elman, its sustainability director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, described certificates as a model "proven" with clean electricity and since extended to sustainable aviation fuel, with green steel as the next application. The limitation carries over as well: certificates can finance capacity that would otherwise struggle to get built, but they do not place low-carbon steel in any particular structure — a Google data center included.

What was not disclosed

• The price of the certificates and the length of the agreement.
• The additional volumes Stegra says it hopes to add beyond the first year.
• When the Boden plant begins commercial production, and at what rate.
• How much steel Google's own data center construction uses annually, which would set the share these certificates cover.
• Any third-party verification of the 95% reduction estimate or of the IEA near-zero classification.