Iron and steel are one of the most important industrial raw materials, and are thus considered as a pillar of the Chinese economy. [1,2] The iron and steel industries play an important role in the national economy of China and are the foundation of its rapid industrialization and urbanization. [3] Steel production and consumption in China were 996.63 and 945.27 million tons in 2019, accounting for 53% and 50% of the world's total steel production and consumption, respectively. [4] However, iron and steel production are one of the most energy-and carbon-intensive processes in the world, and they account for more than 5% of the world's annual energy demand. [5][6][7] It is well known that carbon dioxide emission contributes to climate change and is likely to have an adverse effect on human health. [8] China has proposed the goal of achieving carbon emissions peak by 2030 and will strive to be carbon neutral by 2060. [9] Driven by the carbon neutrality target, a rapid and far-reaching clean iron and steelmaking process is expected. At present, the most common iron and steelmaking process involves a long process, named blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF), which accounts for 90% of China's steel production and is emissionintensive, mainly owing to its reliance on coal. [4] In the presently used iron and steel production processes, energy consumption and CO 2 emissions mainly derive from the ironmaking process. Therefore, decreasing CO 2 emissions and reducing the energy consumption of the blast furnace used in ironmaking are of great importance for the sustainable development of the steel industry in China. [10] In the long term, hydrogen metallurgy has great potential due to its low-carbon emission levels and high efficiency for iron and steelmaking processes. However, the high cost of green hydrogen production has made it difficult for China to absolutely adopt this process. Above all, decreasing carbon emissions and energy consumption through the update of present BF-BOF processes has important practical implications. In recent years, iron coke has become one of the most popular research directions for low-carbon ironmaking in blast furnaces. [11][12][13][14][15][16] Iron coke, which is also named as ferro coke and iron carbon agglomerates, is one of several innovative highly reactive cokes used as blast furnace burdens. Iron coke is helpful for energy saving, CO 2 emissions reduction, and green production of iron in the ironmaking process because it uses cheap coal resources, is highly reactive in the reduction process (in relation to the reaction rate of coke with CO 2 ), and decreases the thermal reserve zone temperature of the blast furnace. [17][18][19][20] In the iron coke carbonization process, approximately 70% of iron oxides in the iron ore powder added to coal are reduced to metallic iron. [21] Metallic iron helps decrease the starting temperature for gasification because it has a catalytic effect on the gasification process. [22] Besides, the number of pores in iron coke is greater