Towards a Cleaner Steel Industry
The process of steelmaking is a very interesting process worth learning for any engineer who wants to sharpen his engineering skill. That’s what I have been trying to do this week which is trying to learn more about the past and current state of the engineering process involved in steel making. through reading books and watching the movies of integrated steel manufacturing facilities I remarked the huge amount of heat produced by this industry and the large part of which is exhausted in steam and gas.
As I was also interested in new ways of producing electricity I remarked that the steelmaking industry could be made better if this large part of exhausted heat through gas and steam was tunneled to other processes that need it like the generation of electricity with steam made from the exhausted gas.
I then started to search if there was a steelmaking facility that was planning to achieve such regeneration of exhausted gas into electricity for the matter of decarbonization or of their process and landed on this interesting Mitsubishi Power’s 180 MW class gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) power plant fired by blast furnace gas (BFG). A solution that allows steelmakers to use the heat of the by-product gases that come from their operations for producing electricity. In the case of the Jiangsu Shagang Group, a leading Chinese steelmaker, it is 180MW of electricity created, making its steel-making facility more environmentally friendly than it would be without this interesting Mitsubishi Power solution.
I don't know what portion of the steelmaking industry actors relies on such kind of technology but it’s obvious that all of them should adopt it because the steelmaking industry is among the industry that produces most of the carbon dioxide that is exhausted into the environment. According to this article, Mitsubishi Power has delivered a total of 74 BFG-fired gas turbines and other low-calorie gas-fired gas turbines to steel plants and other facilities in Europe and Asia with a combined output reaching 8,662 MW. These numbers are a very good signal that tells that carbon dioxide-heavy industries like the steelmaking industry are trying to get cleaner industrial processes.
As I have learned the process of steel making I believe that there is still more room for overexploiting the amount of heat that is generated in the process like the deployment of heat exchangers all along the trajectory of the molten steel from the furnace to the finished steel products. Of course, this is a very big investment for steel plants and this solution may require a complete redesign of a steel plant with an emphasis put on automation and the process done in a very close and controlled environment that will allow the recuperation of all the extra heat generated by the process. I don’t know if you grabbed the idea I tried to convey by you take the example of this robotic hand which would be equipped with a heat exchanger with a circulating fluid that will take the extra convected heat and tunnel it to another process that could be about producing electricity from steam of warming up and office or some homes near this steel plant.
I see in my mind how the layout of this kind of steel plant but I am not sure if I have the time and the engineering skill to go into the thermodynamic model that would tell how much energy waste could be saved if such kind of steel plant is designed. if you do grasp this idea and think that it’s a feasible idea you are free to study it and see how to apply it to the steelmaking industry because this industry is looking for a cleaner way of producing steel and it’s almost sure that we gonna still need steel in the future because it’s a strongly strong and important product of our everyday life and work.
