1st New American Blastfurnace for 30 yrs

The voices tell mee that Nucor are going to build a new blastfurnace in the US, apparently the first in three decades, congrats on that, Corus-Danneli are involved in the project or so i'm told no other details at moment but will post as they release more info.
regards
mark

Primary iron is a good thing.

John Oder

boslab said:

The voices tell mee that Nucor are going to build a new blastfurnace in the US, apparently the first in three decades, congrats on that, Corus-Danneli are involved in the project or so i'm told no other details at moment but will post as they release more info.
regards
mark

Click to expand...

Cool. Nucor is a good company.

Its interesting that Nucor is deciding to build a blast furnace, when the technology is so outdated- the Swedes invented Direct Reduction in the 30's, and many new mills are not coke burning blast, but Direct Reduction.
The Indians, for example, are, as far as I know, still building a DR mill in Northern Minnesota, which will use natural gas to make iron.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/09/19/steelplantopens/

Nucor, generally, has been among the first to use cutting edge tech- they built the first continuous casting mill in the US, and have long used the latest and best tech.

Here is a link to the press release on their Louisiana Mill-
http://www.nucor.com/indexinner.aspx?finpage=newsreleases
It will also generate electricity for resale with its waste heat.

I would guess that local tax giveaway's, energy subsidies, and similar uneven market conditions also help to dictate the type of mill they build.
I have heard that as recently as October, they were still trying to decide between building it in Louisiana, or in Brazil, where the actual iron ore will come from.
Is it really a final decision that it will be the USA?

Probably that the politicians are cheaper to buy here.

I do remember in the 80's reading about the Mini Mills that could turn out lots of different alloys compared to the Blast Furnace, and a steel engineer wrote to the paper and explained why there was plenty of life still in the Blast Furnace method.

Don't know why but he was confident about it. Others might know more.

Stephen

Ries said:

Its interesting that Nucor is deciding to build a blast furnace, when the technology is so outdated- the Swedes invented Direct Reduction in the 30's, and many new mills are not coke burning blast, but Direct Reduction.

Click to expand...

Direct reduction using natural gas uses a prime chemical feedstock in an inefficient way. Using coal it is also inefficient. It works for small plants, but one must assume that Nucor are not interested in a small plant.

It's curious to note that Corus have just announced that they are to temporarily close three blast furnaces, Two in Britain and one in the Netherlands. This will cut their production by 30%.

I dont think it that curious- when demand falls, as it is right now, many producers cut back on production.
Mittal has announced cutbacks, as have most other steel companies.

"efficiency" is a nice way to evaluate things, in a perfect, frictionless world.

Reality, however, is often different.

Nationalism, infrastructure differences, politics, geography, interest rates, and costs of commodities, speculative booms, emissions standards, pyschological busts- all affect reality in unpredictable ways.

Hence, a huge amount of steel is being made in the relatively unpopulated areas of Western Australia, by Direct Reduction, because of the availability of both natural gas and iron ore. It is not, in a perfect world, the most "efficient". But it is cheaper than more efficient uses of materials that exist 10,000 miles away, at the mercy of oscillating oil prices, changing tariffs, and long term contracts for all existing production.

This is common- the Chinese, for example, hold contracts for large quantities of Taconite ore in Northern Minnesota- so closer, american based mills import ore from Brazil.
There are mills around the world that can produce below international cost due to state subsidies, long term contracts for energy, ore, or coke at below today's market prices, or outright state ownership. China sometimes encourages export, thru various state giveaways, and other times actually charges its own producers a tariff on the steel they want to export.

All of these factors make scientific efficiency somewhat meaningless.
You try to build a modern mill, that wont be obsolete soon, that is as efficient as possible, given local conditions, but local conditions include all kind of wild hair variables.

Nonetheless, there are over 60 Direct Reduction Mills operating world wide, and many of them are profitable, while many of the oldest Basic Blast Furnace Mills, especially in North America, are terribly inefficient, in terms of profit, tons produced per manhour, and other gages of efficiency.

So sometimes, looking at energy efficiency in a vacuum, while pleasing, does not tell the whole story.

I'd like to know what "direct reduction" is?

I do not think you can take Taconite and make STEEL from it.

Blast furnace operators take Taconite, Coke and Limestone, and produce IRON, which is converted to STEEL.

Steel Mills are pretty good at making ANY alloy you want, within hundredths of a percent of any given component you need. In at least 250 ton quantities.

Direct reduction sounds to me like what Nucor has always done, melt scrap iron and steel. They have snnounced that they will build a "basic steel mill", one that takes all the ingredients and makes IRON and does a "conversion" to make it into steel.

THAT costs some money. USSteel has announced layoffs, demand is down, I doubt that Nucor can make any investments when demand is down. The market is the driver.

Cheers,

George

I do know that scrap steel is an essential ingredient to the blast furnace process.

Stephen

George, Direct Reduction is a process to take iron ore and make it into iron.
It uses natural gas most commonly, but other fuels are possible.
It does not require coke or limestone.

The old style blast furnaces are 19th century tech.
As I mentioned, Direct Reduction was invented in Sweden in the 1930's, and has been used on an industrial scale, all over the world, ever since. Currently there are about 67 million tons of iron being made this way.

After the iron is refined by Direct Reduction, it goes into an Electric Arc Furnace, and is made into steel by adding the desired ingredients for whatever alloy you want. These EAF's are usually at the head of a continuous casting line, so it can then be rolled into slab, and then plate, bar, or section.

These EAF/continuous casting lines are what Nucor uses in its 20 or so North American mills, and right now virtually all of em remelt scrap. 25 Million tons or so a year.

So at this new mill Nucor has a choice, to process the iron ore- either a traditional coke/limestone blast furnace, or a DR system. Both have been proven, are in common use worldwide, and work just fine.
The choice is based more on local economics, availability of coke versus natural gas, and local laws about emissions.

In the places where DR is most common, coke is expensive, and gas is cheap.

Here is a brief description of the process at the Western Australia mill-
http://www.midrex.com/uploads/documents/Fines to Slabs1.pdf
Pelletized ore is made into iron, then fed to an EAF, then rolled.

Oregon Steel, in Portland, set up DR mill in the USA in 1969.
This is not that new.
Not much of it is done in the USA right now, I guess, but ESSAR, the Indian company, has broken ground on their DR mill in Minnesota.

There is a big mill in Mexico doing it, along with many more around the world.
http://www.worldsteel.org/?action=stats&type=irondr&period=latest

Blue Steel,

Scrap steel is NOT an ingredient of a blast furnace. Iron ore, concentrated, called Taconite pellets, coke and limestone, and some other ingredients. Limestone attracts most of the impurities in the melt

All loaded into Larry cars, trammed to the top of the furnace, dumped, plugs drilled at the base, collected liquid iron tapped out, then fed into the BOP vessels, carbon electrode and oxygen lance, inserted, and lots of scrap steel THEN introduced, along with whatever other metals are required to meet the alloy required.

250 ton ladles poured into the continuous caster, and 10 to 15 slabs made from that ladle.

USSteel has ownership stakes in Taconite and limestone quarries, some coal mines, our own coking operations. Coke works at Clairton, so I read today, with the downturn, is slowing a bit, not shutting downm and will stockpile coke. Work is still in progress with the demolition and replacement of the Next Gen Batteries.

What we don't own outright, we have long term contracts with the producers of. Whether these contracts were renewed when the price of steel was at historic highs or not, I don't know either. Hope not.

2 quarters ago profit was in the 600 millions, more than twice the previous quarter, last quarter, up by half again, this quarter, I couldn't even guess. Hardly matters. Stock was at 197 at one point, now 27 or so.

Mebbe management thinks that laying off 700 will keep the company afloat. We do have VLO, Voluntary Lay Off, with OT cut out, most likely the numbers will be made up of senior people who want some time off from 80 to 100 hour weeks, rather than the youngest men from the department. They might never get called back.

Ries,

Steel company managers belittled the cost of labor some months back. Less than 10 bucks a ton, less than 1 % the price of a ton. It is only anti-Union people who bitch about the cost of labor.

Cheers,

George

OT in this post but germane to the one up a ways, today's paper says that GM needs help posthaste, partly because they have to make a BILLION buck payment into the Pension Fund. That is money they have withheld from the employees checks and is paid quarterly.

They even blew THOSE funds.

I hope they have been making Income and SS withholding payments.

George as far as I can find out Iron Pellets and Scrap Steel are basic ingredients to steel manufacture in the Basic Oxygen Furnace. Fluxes are also added.

The process you described seems to be regarding the process of pelletising Iron into Pig Iron.

Stephen

Blue Steel,

Read a bit more. Once upon a time there was NO scrap steel TO use to make real steel out of "pig iron".

Again, once upon a time, whrought iron was puddles, hence "puddlers", who collected what might be called "semi-steel" from the melt.

IRON is what is made in blast furnaces. Molten iron is poured into the BOP ladles, carbon electrode inserted, along with an oxygen lance to burn out the carbon. Adding scrap steel reduces the length of the processing time, chemistry still needs adjusted. You are making XX alloy, you need XX Moly, you have to analyze, add, mix, analyze again till you get it right. Chromium, ditto. You don't cast it till you have the right chemistry.

You don't make anything you want and sell it unless you are a last generation mini-mill. Or a Chinese shop making rebar. And I would wager they are making some damned good steel today.

Good Christ, man, read the specs on the stock you have to buy to make parts for your own customers. You don't spec "iron". They spec what they require, and if you are in a critical operation, you will take a rubbing of the metal spec, heat, whatever. Traceability. You can't go to the junkyard and buy used axles to make parts for a critical customer.

They won't even spec "iron". They will spec ductile iron, nodular iron, grey iron, malleable iron, even semi-steel.

Scrap steel never goes into the blast furnace, just goes into the molten iron pot with the electrode and the lance in it.

Keep studying. Oh, BOP is not melting the iron ore. It is the conversion of the molten iron into steel. There is the Blast Furnace, to make molten iron, then the BOP Shop to convert that iron into Steel. BASIC Oxygen Process. The Steel part of it.

Cheers,

George

"Basic Oxygen Furnace"

Ah, I see where you are going wrong. There is no "Basic Oxygen Furnace". The blast furnace makes iron, the iron goes to the BOP vessel, scrap is added to the BOP VESSEL to make it more like steel, and more ingredients are added to make spec as impurities are burned out of the mass with the electrode and the oxygen lance.

Sheeze George don't get carried away. I was only ever talking about what was my understanding of it.

Famously in Australia's history the "Steel Master" Essington Lewis then time boss of BHP sold Pig Iron to Japan to finance his own investment for the what he saw as the coming war. He did this because if he didn't sell pig iron they would buy Scrap that he needed to make steel.

Stephen

The nuts and bolts dont matter, the fact is that there is something positive going on, yes there is a recession and yes people are losing jobs, i know the firm i work for are laying off, damping down and running furnaces on slack wind till further notice, closing plants but i feel there is definitly an upward movement, imperceptable may be, perhaps i'm just an optimist.
anyway as pointed out you dont really want to stick scrap in a blasfurnace unless you want to chill it really fast, mill scale is as close as you want to get, Direct reduction is expensive by dollars/ton so uneconomic at present, you really need a 60-70% iron ore, heamatite or similar, even then you may have to concentrate it in a sinter plant.
There isnt anything called a Basic Oxygen Furnace, its a basic oxygen convertor, carbon in the iron is oxidised to produce CO by the addition of oxygen via a lance [when i say 'lance' i do mean a big big water cooled 12" diameter 80' long thing that has a copper tip, normally with 5 holes or venturi of specific shape to send the oxy stream supersonic [mach 2] the liquid iron in the convertor then goes into what could best be described as a metal 'emulsion' of swirling droplets to give a vast surface area for carbon to react plus the fact that the way to remove phos is a metal/slag [lime] reaction.
at the start of the 'blow' the Si oxidises rapidly in an exothermic reaction [melts the scrap too] temp rises from 900/1000 up to 1600/1700 in mins.
iron with 4-5% C goes in, 12 mins later C is down to 0.045 or ther abouts.
tap the steel then degass and trim analysis.
cast it
job done
electric arc is mainly a scrap convertor though there are plants useing liqid iron in them to produce specials by smaller batch, easier to controll chemistry 100 ton at a time.
regards
mark
[and i still think its brilliant building now, you are either riding the wave or paddling after it, sit on the beach and you miss it altogether]

boslab,

Good description. The carbon electrode in the BOP vessel is to keep the melt hot while you blow thousands of CF of O through it.

The mini-mills use carbon arc to just melt scrap steel. They don't start with ore and limestone and coke. They, initially, couldn't make the steels to spec, either. They have gotten good enough to be competition, but it took a few million tons of profits to allow them to improve their process to make "good steel".

They are getting ahead of the majors with "thin strip casting". We are casting slabs at 8 inches. We have a 70 year old rolling mill designed for that.

New mills can build from the ground up to make less than 2 inch strip and roll it straight from the caster instead of carry by rail 5 miles or so to our plant.

Our caster or blast furnaces were down a few years ago and we brought in Brazilian slabs. Shipped by barge, I guess. No one knew, nor thought to measure them. 10 inches thick. Our mill reduced 8 inch by about a 1/3 per stand, 2 1/2 inches or so. When the first slab hit the first stand, 4 1/2 inch reduction, 20 foot D by 3 foot W bull gear stopped right now, helical pinion tried to keep turning, shattered the thrust bearing and the gear case.

Put us down damned near as long as it took to get the caster or blast furnaces back up, forget which it was. Everything is big in these mills.

Cheers,

George

Stephen,

Most of the world sold Japan all the scrap they would buy in the 10 years leading up to WWII. Lewis didn't "need" scrap to make steel. He did need it to hold down the cost and make more of it in the same amount of time. He didn't have to buy chromium and cobalt and nickel and other elements to make steel as much as he would have had he had to start from iron alone and MAKE steel. Sorry, he would have had to buy LESS of the alloying ingredients.

If the Japanese had had to start from ore, they might have not been ready to start their part of the war when they did. Chromium, Nickel, Moly, Cobalt, many were so expensive that they might not have been able to go to war at that time.

Thanks George. Interesting to know. The book I read reported it as I told it to you. Seems there was an error there.

Stephen

See post #2 and thanks George for taking time to say the way it is.

John Oder

So, George, how long have you been working for USS?

Gene