Displaying items by tag: Steel Authority of India

India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has started using two electric trucks to transport slag as part of its E-Truck project. They are being used to transport slag from the Steel Authority of India Limited’s (SAIL) Rourkela plant to the cement producer’s plant at Rajgangpur. The company has also commissioned two charging stations at its Rajgangpur plant and three more are to be installed by March 2022. The E-Trucks initiative is intended to reduce Dalmia Cement Bharat’s carbon emissions from transportation and decrease its logistics costs. A further 20 electric trucks are intended to start use by the end of the 2022 financial year.

“Achieving environmental sustainability has always been a priority for us at Dalmia Cement Bharat from a business and a social standpoint. While we are grateful that our government is creating the right policy and investment environment that encourages organisations to take positive environmental action, as private organisations we need to take the lead,” said Mahendra Singhi, managing director and chief executive officer, Dalmia Cement Bharat. He added that the company was confident that it would able to achieve its sustainability goal of becoming carbon negative by 2040.

India: Engineering company Paul Wurth has released details on a new blast furnace it supplied for the Steel Authority of India’s (SAIL) Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh. It supplied, with Larsen & Toubro, a 2.8Mt/yr blast furnace for the site that was commissioned in February 2018. The unit was the eighth furnace at the plant following seven mid-size furnaces of Soviet design built from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Slag processing equipment for the furnace included an Inba slag granulation unit with a cooling tower. Other general equipment supplied for the project included: copper and cast iron staves; a 2H Bell Less Top charging syste
m with pressure equalizing valves and bleeders; cardan-type tuyere stocks; a hot stoves plant of three internal combustion chamber stoves with waste gas heat recovery and process valves of Paul Wurth design; pulverized coal injection based on dense-phase conveying with three injection hoppers and 70t/hr capacity; a top gas cleaning plant with axial cyclone; annular gap scrubber and downstream energy recovery turbine. Paul Wurth also supplied its BFXpert Level 2 automation system to allow and control of the plant operation.

Paul Wurth noted that a particular challenge of the project was to fit the new blast furnace into a brownfield building site. In particular, the layouts of the main charging conveyor, the racks for utilities pipes and cables and the railway tracks had to be finalised with ‘unconventional’ solutions.

Blast Furnace 8 at Bhilai is the largest blast furnace put into operation by Paul Wurth in India so far. It has an inner volume of 4060m³, a hearth diameter of 13.4m, four tapholes and 36 tuyeres. The nominal production is 8030t/day of hot metal.

India: Union officials at the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) have asked for an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into an alleged fixing of the price of blast furnace granulated slag (BFGS). The RSP claims that it couldn’t sell its slag by electronic auction due to limited storage space, lack of rail transport logistics and low market price of BFGS, according to the New Indian Express newspaper. However, sources quoted by the newspaper say that the plant had sufficient storage space and that at least three times as much railway cargo capacity was available as the RSP has indicated. It is estimated that it undersold its product by at least US$15.5m. Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram has also accused the steelmaker of favouring local cement producer OCL India in the scheme.

India: JSW Cement started building a 2.4Mt/yr cement grinding plant in January 2016 at Salboni in West Bengal. The US$119m plant will produce both Portland slag cement and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS). It is planned to be finished in the first quarter of 2017. Environmental clearance for the project was granted in mid-January 2016.

Raw materials for the grinding plant include 0.74 – 095Mt/yr of slag and 1.50 – 1.76Mt/yr of clinker. The slag will be sourced from Tata Steel and the Steel Authority of India. Originally the site was intended for a 10Mt/yr steel plant, according to local media.

India: Close on the heels of despatching its first export consignment of steel to quake-hit Nepal on 30 July 2015, the Steel Authority of India's newly expanded and modernised IISCO Steel Plant at Burnpur has sent its first export consignment of granulated slag to Bhutan.

The consignment, which consisted of 4000t of slag produced from the plant's new blast furnace, will be utilised by cement plants in Bhutan, as well as by Indian cement producers ACC and Burnpur Cement. IISCO steel plant currently produces around 40,000t/month of granulated slag and has export orders lined up from other neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. Preparation is ongoing for an export consignment of two rakes of granulated slag to customers in Nepal.