Glenbrook Steel Mill | |
---|---|
Built | 1968 |
Location | Auckland, New Zealand |
Coordinates | 37°13′S174°44′E / 37.21°S 174.74°E |
New Zealand Steel Limited is the owner of the Glenbrook Steel Mill, a steel mill located 40 kilometres south of Auckland, in Glenbrook, New Zealand. The mill was constructed in 1968 and began producing steel products in 1969. Currently, the mill produces 650,000 tonnes of steel a year, which is either used domestically or exported. [1] [2] Over 90% of New Zealand's steel requirements are produced at Glenbrook, while the remaining volume is produced by Pacific Steel, a steel recycling facility in Ōtāhuhu, Auckland.[ citation needed ] The mill is served by the Mission Bush Branch railway line, which was formerly a branch line to Waiuku. Coal and lime trains arrive daily. Steel products are also transported daily. The mill employs 1,150 full-time staff and 200 semi-permanent contractors.
New Zealand Steel is notable due to its unique [1] [2] utilization of ironsand as its ore. Because ironsand is a low grade ore with many contaminants, the mill's primary plants' operations and equipment are unusual. [2]
The west coast beaches of the North Island of New Zealand between Kaipara Harbour and Whanganui contain ironsand deposits rich in the mineral titanomagnetite. [3] From the late 19th century to the 1950s, there were many unsuccessful attempts to smelt steel from the ironsands. A prize offered by the Taranaki Provincial Government was never claimed, mostly due to problems encountered by people attempting to process the iron sand, such as a viscous slag of titanium carbides and nitrides that forms and blocks equipment when heat is applied to the sand. [4] In 1954, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research began investigating smelting from the ironsands. In 1959, The New Zealand Government established the NZ Steel Investigating Company under the Iron and Steel Industry Act 1959 as a vehicle for the investigations. [5]
New Zealand Steel Limited was incorporated by the New Zealand Government in 1965. In 1967, construction started on a mill at Glenbrook. [6] Glenbrook was chosen as the site due to the area's proximity to the Waikato North Head ironsand mine and Huntly Power Station. [4] Commercial operations began in 1968, with imported feed coil being used to produce steel for domestic and Pacific Island markets. The company pioneered the direct reduction process for reducing iron oxide (ironsand) into metallic iron. This culminated in the commissioning in 1970 of iron and steelmaking facilities to produce billets for domestic and export markets. Expansion continued with the commissioning of a pipe plant in 1972 and a prepainting line in 1982. Total output at this time averaged 300,000 tonnes a year.
The steel company ran at a loss during the 1970s, until 1981 when a more optimised, commercially viable method for extracting iron was implemented, leading to an expansion of the Glenbrook facilities. [4]
In the Think Big era of New Zealand industrialisation, the mill was upgraded. In 1987, New Zealand Steel was acquired by Equiticorp. Equiticorp was bankrupted in the New Zealand sharemarket crash of 1987. In 1989 New Zealand Steel was acquired by Helenus Corporation, which consisted of Fisher & Paykel, Steel & Tube, ANZ Bank and BHP. In 1992, BHP took up a controlling interest with an 81% shareholding by acquiring the shares of Fisher & Paykel and Steel & Tube. The company was initially renamed BHP New Zealand Steel Limited, then in 2002 was renamed New Zealand Steel when BHP Steel was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange as BlueScope. [6]
On 21 May 2023, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced that the New Zealand Government would provide funding of up to $140 million for an initiative to halve the consumption of coal at the Glenbrook plant and reduce carbon emissions. The project involves installation of an electric arc furnace to replace coal as the heat source for recycling scrap metal. [7]
The ironsand ore is mined at an opencast mine at Waikato North Head. [1] The ironsand is then mixed to form a slurry and transported to the mill by an 18 kilometre long pipeline. [2] Approximately, 1.2 million tonnes of ironsand ore are delivered to the mill annually. The area is estimated to contain over a billion tonnes. [8]
Glenbrook's iron plant contains four multiple hearth furnaces, [9] four rotary kilns, and two melters. The kilns directly reduce the ore to metallic iron. This process is unusual as most mills use blast furnaces for the reduction process.
In the steelmaking plant, vanadium recovery and removal is done due to the high vanadium content of the ironsand ore. [2] The sand also contains aluminium, manganese and titanium. [10] Oxidation of the molten metal and contaminants is achieved by a basic oxygen steelmaking facility. The process used in the converter is the second unusual piece of equipment: oxygen is blown on both top and bottom of the converter (Klöckner Oxygen Blown Maxhütte process, or KOBM converter), whereas oxygen is only blasted at the top of the converter in most steelmaking plants.
Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and/or scrap. Steel has been made for millennia, and was commercialized on a massive scale in the 1850s and 1860s, using the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes.
Basic oxygen steelmaking, also known as Linz-Donawitz steelmaking or the oxygen converter process, is a method of primary steelmaking in which carbon-rich molten pig iron is made into steel. Blowing oxygen through molten pig iron lowers the carbon content of the alloy and changes it into low-carbon steel. The process is known as basic because fluxes of calcium oxide or dolomite, which are chemical bases, are added to promote the removal of impurities and protect the lining of the converter.
A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel. It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also be a plant where steel semi-finished casting products are made from molten pig iron or from scrap.
An open-hearth furnace or open hearth furnace is any of several kinds of industrial furnace in which excess carbon and other impurities are burnt out of pig iron to produce steel. Because steel is difficult to manufacture owing to its high melting point, normal fuels and furnaces were insufficient for mass production of steel, and the open-hearth type of furnace was one of several technologies developed in the nineteenth century to overcome this difficulty. Compared with the Bessemer process, which it displaced, its main advantages were that it did not expose the steel to excessive nitrogen, was easier to control, and permitted the melting and refining of large amounts of scrap iron and steel.
An electric arc furnace (EAF) is a furnace that heats material by means of an electric arc.
Ferroalloy refers to various alloys of iron with a high proportion of one or more other elements such as manganese (Mn), aluminium (Al), or silicon (Si). They are used in the production of steels and alloys. The alloys impart distinctive qualities to steel and cast iron or serve important functions during production and are, therefore, closely associated with the iron and steel industry, the leading consumer of ferroalloys. The leading producers of ferroalloys in 2014 were China, South Africa, India, Russia and Kazakhstan, which accounted for 84% of the world production. World production of ferroalloys was estimated as 52.8 million tonnes in 2015.
An ironworks or iron works is an industrial plant where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and steel products are made. The term is both singular and plural, i.e. the singular of ironworks is ironworks.
IISCO Steel Plant of Steel Authority of India Limited is an integrated steel plant located at Burnpur, a neighbourhood in Asansol city, in the Asansol subdivision of Paschim Bardhaman district, West Bengal, India.
The global steel industry has been going through major changes since 1970. China has emerged as a major producer and consumer, as has India to a lesser extent. Consolidation has been rapid in Europe. According to the 2019 International Energy Agency (IEA) report, the iron and steel industry directly contributed 2.6 Gt to global CO2 emissions and accounted for 7% of global energy demand. Singapore is the world's main trading hub for iron, with about 90% of the world's iron ore derivatives traded on their stock exchange.
Ironsand, also known as iron-sand or iron sand, is a type of sand with heavy concentrations of iron. It is typically dark grey or blackish in color.
Stewarts & Lloyds was a steel tube manufacturer with its headquarters in Glasgow at 41 Oswald Street. The company was created in 1903 by the amalgamation of two of the largest iron and steel makers in Britain: A. & J. Stewart & Menzies, Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, Scotland; and Lloyd & Lloyd, Birmingham, England.
The tatara (鑪) is a traditional Japanese furnace used for smelting iron and steel. The word later also came to mean the entire building housing the furnace. The traditional steel in Japan comes from ironsand processed in a special way, called the tatara system.
Mining in New Zealand began when the Māori quarried rock such as argillite in times prior to European colonisation. Mining by Europeans began in the latter half of the 19th century.
The HIsarna ironmaking process is a direct reduced iron process for iron making in which iron ore is processed almost directly into liquid iron (pig iron). The process combines two process units, the Cyclone Converter Furnace (CCF) for ore melting and pre-reduction and a Smelting Reduction Vessel (SRV) where the final reduction stage to liquid iron takes place. The process does not require the manufacturing of iron ore agglomerates such as pellets and sinter, nor the production of coke, which are necessary for the blast furnace process. Without these steps, the HIsarna process is more energy-efficient and has a lower carbon footprint than traditional ironmaking processes. In 2018 Tata Steel announced it has demonstrated that more than 50% CO2 emission reduction is possible with HIsarna technology, without the need for carbon capture technology.
John Chambers was a British citizen who became a New Zealand businessman and ironsands entrepreneur.
In 2022, the U.S. was the third-largest producer of raw steel worldwide, after China and India, and ranked sixth in pig iron production. By November 2024, the industry produced over 74 million net tons annually.
The Onehunga Ironworks was a colonial-era iron smelting and rolling operation at Onehunga, on the Manukau Harbour,. It was at one time claimed to be the largest ironworks in the Southern Hemisphere. It is significant, both as the first large scale attempt to exploit New Zealand's iron-sand by direct reduction, and as a precursor of the modern steel industry of New Zealand.
Otaua is a rural settlement in the Waikato District and Waikato region of New Zealand's North Island. It is located south of Waiuku and west of Aka Aka, on the northern side of the Waikato River. The Otaua area includes the Waikato North Head on the northern side of the Waikato River mouth, opposite Port Waikato to the south.
A metallurgical furnace, often simply referred to as a furnace when the context is known, is an industrial furnace used to heat, melt, or otherwise process metals. Furnaces have been a central piece of equipment throughout the history of metallurgy; processing metals with heat is even its own engineering specialty known as pyrometallurgy.
Manufacturing in New Zealand contributed $23 billion (12%) of the country's gross domestic product and directly employed 241,000 people in 2017, while manufactured goods made up 52% of the country's exports by value. The food and beverage subsector alone contributed 32% of manufacturing's GDP and 71% of exports.