Nippon Steel, Japan’s largest integrated mill, plans to develop technologies for a large-scale electric-arc furnace mill (EAF) and will start installation around 2030 as a part of the company’s ‘Carbon Neutral Vision 2050’ project, it announced on March 30. The EAF will replace one of its existing blast furnaces, but further details are not decided, it said.
If the plan is realised, the large electric furnace will only be the company’s second EAF, following that scheduled to start operating in the first half of 2022 at the Hirohata Area of its Setouchi Works in western Japan. That furnace will replace the Scrap Melting Process (SMP) unit there which has about 720,000 tonnes/year of capacity.
The size of the larger EAF will be decided after Nippon Steel decides which blast furnace it will replace, with the steel output being comparable, a company official explained, adding that the planned unit will be much larger than the one at Hirohata.
“We expect it to be the largest in Japan and maybe even the largest in the world, because its capacity needs to be similar to a blast furnace,” she said. Currently, average capacity of the blast furnaces the company hosts is about 4 million tonnes/year, she estimated.
The largest EAF in Japan currently is the one at the Tahara works of mini-mill Tokyo Steel Manufacturing in central Japan, with 2.5 million t/y steelmaking capacity, Mysteel Global notes.
The new EAF will be able to produce high-quality steel, the Nippon Steel official emphasized. “Our venture in the US may help us with the development because, even though the size of the Alabama EAF is smaller than what we plan for Japan, it will still be larger than the one at Hirohata,” she said.
Last December, Nippon Steel announced it had signed a definitive agreement with ArcelorMittal to jointly build a new 1.5 million t/y capacity EAF at their joint venture, AM/NS Calvert LLC, in Alabama in the southern US, as reported. That EAF is scheduled to start operating in the first half of 2023.
Developed in 1993 and linked to the ladle furnace at the Hirohata works, SMP is positioned as a more environmentally-friendly process that allows not only the recycling of ferrous scrap but also steelmaking dust and waste tyres, according to Nippon Steel.
Written by Yoko Manabe, yoko.manabe@mysteel.com
This article has been published under an article exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and SteelMint.
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