by DCN » November 18, 2019, 11:11 am
Until now virtually all the ore transported on the lakes has been destined for integrated mills. Iron ore is iron oxide and needs to be converted into metallic iron before it can be made into steel, that’s the purpose of a blast furnace. Pig iron, the product of a blast furnace, is metallic iron with a carbon content of around 3-5 percent. In an integrated mill this is fed directly into the steelmaking furnaces where, along with the addition of some scrap, the carbon content is reduced resulting in steel. Of course there are thousands of different alloys of steel that can be made, each with a different chemistry.
That variety of different alloys is a problem with minimills that use only scrap metal as their raw material. While there are many grades of scrap that enable a fairly precise control of what goes into a furnace charge, inevitably an alloy with unwanted elements get into the mix. To dilute these unwanted elements they add pig iron which is a “clean” form of iron being made directly from iron ore.
An alternative to pig iron for minimills is Direct Reduced Iron (DRI). There are a variety of methods to make DRI but is basically comes down to the same chemical process as in a blast furnace but at a lower temperature. Iron ore goes in and the end product, instead of being molten iron, is a spongy mass that is often compressed into briquettes. These briquettes can be fed into an electric furnace in place of pig iron.
The new Cleveland Cliffs plant being built in Toledo in the first large scale direct reduced iron facility on the Great Lakes. As I understand it the plant will consume around 3-4 million tons of ore a year to produce about 2 million tons of iron briquettes. Around 50 million tons of iron ore have been produced in the U.S. in recent years. There was also the Mesabi Nugget plant in Minnesota roughly a decade ago that produced a nugget of metallic iron from a modified type of taconite pellet. I think a few test loads of these nuggets were shipped out of the Hallett Docks in Duluth. The project was a joint venture between Steel Dynamics and Kobe Steel and the nuggets would have been used in Steel Dynamics electric furnaces instead of pig iron.
As for the future of shipping ore on the lakes I don’t think it’s going away any time soon, the geography is just too convenient to make lake shipping the most efficient option. While there is much doom and gloom about the future of the integrated steel mill I don’t think the blast furnace is going extinct just yet, but only the huge furnaces will survive. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more DRI plants built around the lakes in the future by both integrated and minimill based steel companies.
DCN
Until now virtually all the ore transported on the lakes has been destined for integrated mills. Iron ore is iron oxide and needs to be converted into metallic iron before it can be made into steel, that’s the purpose of a blast furnace. Pig iron, the product of a blast furnace, is metallic iron with a carbon content of around 3-5 percent. In an integrated mill this is fed directly into the steelmaking furnaces where, along with the addition of some scrap, the carbon content is reduced resulting in steel. Of course there are thousands of different alloys of steel that can be made, each with a different chemistry.
That variety of different alloys is a problem with minimills that use only scrap metal as their raw material. While there are many grades of scrap that enable a fairly precise control of what goes into a furnace charge, inevitably an alloy with unwanted elements get into the mix. To dilute these unwanted elements they add pig iron which is a “clean” form of iron being made directly from iron ore.
An alternative to pig iron for minimills is Direct Reduced Iron (DRI). There are a variety of methods to make DRI but is basically comes down to the same chemical process as in a blast furnace but at a lower temperature. Iron ore goes in and the end product, instead of being molten iron, is a spongy mass that is often compressed into briquettes. These briquettes can be fed into an electric furnace in place of pig iron.
The new Cleveland Cliffs plant being built in Toledo in the first large scale direct reduced iron facility on the Great Lakes. As I understand it the plant will consume around 3-4 million tons of ore a year to produce about 2 million tons of iron briquettes. Around 50 million tons of iron ore have been produced in the U.S. in recent years. There was also the Mesabi Nugget plant in Minnesota roughly a decade ago that produced a nugget of metallic iron from a modified type of taconite pellet. I think a few test loads of these nuggets were shipped out of the Hallett Docks in Duluth. The project was a joint venture between Steel Dynamics and Kobe Steel and the nuggets would have been used in Steel Dynamics electric furnaces instead of pig iron.
As for the future of shipping ore on the lakes I don’t think it’s going away any time soon, the geography is just too convenient to make lake shipping the most efficient option. While there is much doom and gloom about the future of the integrated steel mill I don’t think the blast furnace is going extinct just yet, but only the huge furnaces will survive. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more DRI plants built around the lakes in the future by both integrated and minimill based steel companies.
DCN