Abstract Analysis of CO2 emission has attracted more attention due to increasing environmental awareness. As a pillar of the national economy, the CO2 emissions of the metallurgical industry continually increased during 2000–2015 and reached around 3208.65 million tons in 2015. Thus, research on the CO2 emission performance of the metallurgical industry is significant for achieving binding emission reduction targets in China's 13th Five-Year Plan as well as constructing clean and low carbon energy system based on the directives of the 19th CPC National Congress. Taking regional heterogeneity into consideration, we construct a Metafrontier Malmquist CO2 Emissions Performance Index (MMCPI) to conducts a multi-dimensional analysis of the CO2 emissions performance in metallurgical industry of China, focusing on the CO2 emission efficiency, the main influencing factors of carbon performance and CO2 emission reduction potentials. Based on the aforementioned analysis, the paper finds that technological progress change was the main factor contributing to the improvement of the CO2 emissions efficiency of the metallurgical industry. Under the meta-frontier, Central and Western China still have a CO2 emissions reduction potential of 75.3% and 81.1% correspondingly. Under the group-frontier, the lowest reduction potential in Eastern, Central and Western China is in Jiangsu, Hubei and Chongqing respectively.