The promise of blast furnaces

摘要

"If you keep investing to keep your blast furnaces running well, our experience shows that there's no metal-production system that can beat the blast furnace," says Dr. Huib den Hartog, manager of technology at Hoogovens' Ijmuiden Works. Hoogovens now produces more iron with two blast furnaces than it did 14 years ago with three BFs. Blast furnaces in the U.S. likewise now are one-quarter more productive than they were a decade ago. They're using one-quarter less coke than they did in 1975, saving some 350 pounds of coke per ton of iron. At the same time that the number of blast furnaces has plummeted from 197 to 43, the average annual output per active BF has zoomed from 590,000 to 1.4 million tons, William Hogan and Frank Koelble report (article, this issue). Blast furnaces support 60 percent of U.S. steel-making activity today-the same as in 1980.