India-based steelmaker Tata Steel has announced that it will begin a fourth test production campaign on the HIsarna pilot plant at its IJmuiden works in the Netherlands. The trial is scheduled to start in mid-May and to last about six weeks.
According to Tata Steel, HIsarna is a new technology, partly developed in IJmuiden, which enables the direct input of coal and fine iron ore into the iron making furnace. The technology saves energy consumption by eliminating two of the key raw material processing stages in blast furnace iron making: coking, the production of coke from coal, and sintering. Should the HIsarna technology prove technically and commercially viable, the elimination of these processing steps could reduce the emission of carbon dioxide from conventional iron making by 20 percent.
After analyzing the results of this campaign, Tata Steel and its partners will start preparing for a prolonged fifth campaign in 2015 which would last six months.
As previously reported by SteelOrbis, the first HIsarna test campaign, in spring 2011, proved that a plant using the breakthrough technology can operate in practice, not merely in theory, with the engineers succeeding in producing liquid iron.