Global Slag News

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.

Indonesia: Krakatau Semen Indonesia (KSI) is targeting strategic infrastructure projects for its slag cement products. The company’s ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) no longer requires special permission to be used, according to the Antara news agency. The joint venture between Krakatau Steel and Semen Indonesia operates a 0.69Mt/yr slag grinding plant at Cilegon in Banten.

US: Charah has purchased SCB International to jointly develop and deploy technologies including fly ash beneficiation and mineral grinding technologies. Its intentions are to target: the beneficiation of fly ash for sale to concrete producers; processing kiln dust to remove mercury for emissions regulations compliance; and grinding granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) and pozzolan for sale to concrete producers. Charah says that the acquisition will also allow it to more than double the volume of materials available to its customers.

“By leveraging SCB’s diversity of materials available and by benefiting from their experience in sourcing materials overseas, we see great potential in marketing the fly ash beneficiation and grinding technologies to our customers, both utilities and concrete producers,” said Scott Ziegler, Vice President of Ash Sales and Marketing at Charah.

As part of this agreement, Charah has acquired SCB’s proprietary fly ash beneficiation technology which will allow Charah to improve the quality of fly ash produced by electric utilities and to increase Charah’s supply of fly ash to concrete producers in the US. Charah also will deploy grinding technologies for GBFS and pozzolan and will market these supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) to the manufacturers of concrete products.

Both the ash beneficiation and the mineral grinding technologies will support Charah’s expanding MultiSource fly ash distribution network. The MultiSource fly ash network will help ensure that Charah can provide a steady and reliable supply of SCMs for ready mix concrete producers throughout the US.

Charah provides ash management, fly ash sales and marketing and utility support services for the coal-fired power generation industry. Its services include landfill design, construction, management, operations and closure; fly ash, bottom ash and gypsum sales and marketing; ash pond management and closure; structural fill projects; and power plant support services including limestone supply and flue-gas desulfurisation operations

France: ArcelorMittal plans to increase its stake in Ecocem France to 49% from 30% by the end of May 2018. The transaction is subject to the approval of the Irish Competition Authority. The French subsidiary of Ireland’s Ecocem was set up in 2007 by ArcelorMittal and Ecocem Materials.

Ecocem produces slag cement from ground granulated blast furnace slag. Ecocem France operates a 0.7Mt/yr grinding plant at Fos-sur-Mer near to an ArcelorMittal plant. It plans to open a second 0.7Mt/yr grinding plant at Dunkirk in May 2018. The new plant is intended to target western and northern France as well as export markets in the UK and Belgium.

China/Japan: Chinese customs have returned 14,100t of imported non-ferrous slag back to Japan the General Administration of Customs has said. The products were declared as iron oxide and iron powder, according to Reuters. However, they were found to be iron sludge and non-ferrous slag. These by-products have faced an import ban since the beginning of 2018.