Abstract: Under the background of “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality”strategy, hydrogen metallurgy with hydrogen instead of carbon become one of the effective ways for iron and steel enterprises to realize green, low-carbon and sustainable development while optimizing energy structure and process flow. Sorting and tracing the development history of hydrogen metallurgy, taking the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol as a time node, combined with the improvement of iron ore smelting process from “replacing coke with coal and gas” to “replacing carbon with hydrogen and reducing carbon with hydrogen”, the low-carbon transformation of ironmaking process is from reducing the dependence on coke and coking coal to focusing on reducing carbon emissions, and then to taking net zero carbon emissions as the ultimate goal, gradually forming two technical routes: hydrogen-rich smelting process of blast furnace and hydrogen based direct reduction process. According to the current production structure and carbon reduction goal of China's iron and steel industry, the blast furnace ironmaking process, which accounts for 90% of the output, emits a large proportion of carbon emissions. The low-carbon smelting of blast furnace is an important path to realize the low-carbon transformation of China's iron and steel industry. At the same time, the hydrogen-rich smelting of blast furnace is an important breakthrough path, which is of significance to the industrial application of ironmaking in the transition period of carbon peak and carbon neutrality. From the perspective of the future development of the iron and steel industry and the transformation of energy structure, hydrogen based direct reduction process is an important route to achieve net zero carbon emission in the iron and steel industry. At the same time, the key problems to be solved in the development of hydrogen metallurgy include green and economic hydrogen production and safe large-scale hydrogen use.