Global Slag News

France: Ecocem France has ordered a Loesche type LM 46.2+2 CS mill for a slag cement grinding plant that it is building in Dunkirk. It follows a previous order by Ecocem of a LM 46.2+2 CS mill for the dry grinding of ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) at its plant at Fos-sur-Mer.

The LM 46.2+2 CS for the plant in Dunkirk is designed for the grinding of cement clinker and granulated blast furnace slag at a capacity of 105t/hr GGBFS. The gearbox will have a capacity of 3150kW.

All the mechanical equipment for the grinding plant starting from mill feed to the product discharge into the product silos is included in the Loesche scope of supply. The Loma heater type LF 28-L will be a full-inlined type designed to burn natural gas as well as blast furnace gas. The burner supplied by Loesche will be the MSBZ type, complete with fitting rack and local switch cabinet.

The lead-time for the main components of the mill and for the additional units included in the scope of supply is 6 to 13 months. The commissioning of the vertical roller mill is planned for the middle of 2017.

Ecocem’s grinding plant will be installed close to Arcelor steelworks for use of their granulated blast furnace slag. This LM 46.2+2 CS will be the seventh Loesche vertical roller mill installation for slag and cement grinding in France.

Russia: NLMK Group has completed hot-testing of its new crushing and screening unit for the processing of steelmaking slag at its Lipetsk plant. The project will double the amount of scrap, or ‘metal inclusions‘, extracted from waste and returned to the production process. The new unit will process 2.4Mt/yr of slag, replacing an obsolete unit, which processed 1.7Mt/yr of slag. Metal extraction efficiency at the new unit will be as high as 95%, which will minimise the consumption of iron ore and scrap in pig iron and steelmaking operations through replacement with recoverables. The project had an investment of US$7.2m.

“The new unit will process the entire volume of our steelmaking slag, which is about 2.2Mt/yr, as well as allowing us to eliminate the need to process slag via third parties. The unit will also help us to recycle previously accumulated waste. This Strategy 2017 project is our next step towards increasing the role of recycling in bringing down steelmaking costs and reducing our environmental footprint,” said Sergei Filatov, the managing director of Novolipetsk.

Recovering production waste is one of NLMK’s priorities as part of its operational efficiency improvement efforts. NLMK Group is currently building a new briquetting plant at the Lipetsk plant. Briquettes will be manufactured from a mix of iron ore concentrate and blast furnace slag formed in the process of wet blast furnace gas cleaning. The plant will recycle more than 350,000t/yr of blast furnace waste.

Japan: Aichi Steel is set to increase production of AS Shot, a high strength abrasive shot made using steel slag. It plans to upgrade its Chita plant to increase output fivefold for the 2017 financial year, according to Japan Metal Daily. Shooting is applied for plating base materials and removing rust in a wide range of fields including bridges, automobiles and shipbuilding. Use of AS Shot reduces the amount of dust generated during blasting and enables treatment to have a long life and excellent machinability.

Zambia: BMR Group has finished laboratory scale test work on its imperial smelting furnace (ISF) slag dump at its Kabwe site. The company now intends to commission a study to convert its ISFS stockpile into a Joint Ore Reserves Committee (JORC) compliant resource. The site contains potentially 120,000t of zinc.

"These results are especially encouraging as they demonstrate the potential for BMR to extract a greater proportion of the in situ materials at Kabwe than previously anticipated for the benefit of our shareholders. We will therefore be commissioning a JORC survey of the ISF slag and will report the results of this survey to shareholders when available," said chairman Alex Borrelli.

Following the tests the company has announced that, in co-operation with Kupfermelt Metal Processing, its has reached a recovery of 85% zinc and 91% lead at a leach temperature of 80°C and 75% zinc and 80% lead at an ambient temperature. It has also more than halved its sulphuric acid consumption, compared to tests run in September 2015, to approximately 500kg/t. The sulphating acid brine leach process also recovered approximately 90% of the contained vanadium from the slag/leach plant residues (LPR) composite. The IFS slag potentially contains 9000t of vanadium which is expected to be recovered in the form of vanadium pentoxide.

BMR's metallurgical partner has advised that the proposed Kabwe processing plant can in due course be modified to incorporate a sulphating acid brine leach circuit to process the slag/LPR composite. The company's strategy remains however to treat first the wash plant tailings with the acid brine leach process.

India: The state government of Odisha has asked the Steel Authority of India to build infrastructure, including a cement plant, in the Sundargarh district. The admission came about at a meeting between Steel Authority chairman P K Singh and chief minister Naveen Patnaik at the state secretariat. Other projects the state would like the steel producer to build include a hospital, a medical college and an education centre, according to the Times of India.