By DPA
Duisburg (Germany) : A new blast furnace is rising up over the Ruhr city of Duisburg for the first time in years. Demand from China for high-quality steel has led the traditional German steel maker ThyssenKrupp to call out of retirement engineers who had long believed their skills were out of date.
Hundreds of workers can now be seen clambering over the scaffolding around the 89-metre chimney, all under the supervision of Hans-Juergen Schulokat.
“This is an investment of 250 million euros ($340 million), with 700 to 800 people with all kinds of skills on site on any one day,” says Schulokat, who worked for the company for 37 years.
“You need experience to run this kind of thing,” he adds. That was clearly the way ThyssenKrupp saw it. They called the 64-year-old back from retirement to run the project.
Furnace 8, the first such project to be initiated by the company in 15 years and the only construction site of its kind in Europe, is to be completed before the end of the year.
“China is driving steel demand up,” says ThyssenKrupp spokesman Erwin Schneider. Global production totalled 1.24 billion tonnes in 2006, and that is expected to rise by 150 million tonnes in 2008.
ThyssenKrupp is riding the steel boom, unable to meet demand for top-quality steels in recent years and seeing its profits rise.
The company has embarked on a six-billion-euro investment programme, with new sites in Brazil and Alabama and expansion at its Duisburg home.
Furnace 9, directly across the way from the new blast furnace, is being refurbished at a cost of 90 million euros.
Schukolat has had his anxious moments, as the construction works have on occasion turned up the unexpected.
There have been blast furnaces on the site since 1896, and little of the past building activity has been documented.
One of the mechanical shovels unearthed a World War II bomb – Germany’s industrial heartland was a frequent target of the Allied bombers. “The shovel operator kept very calm,” Schukolat recalls.
Once operational, the furnace will blast air heated to 1,210 degrees Celsius through 11,000 tonnes of iron ore and coke fed daily onto its conveyors that lead to the mouth some 70 metres up.
The oxygen in the iron oxide is turned into carbon dioxide (CO2), as 5,600 tonnes of molten iron cascade down to tap hole.
The heat and the weight require strong construction. Schukolat’s team has poured 5,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete for the foundations, and the walls of firebrick are up to 1.8 metres thick.
The furnace will use as much water as a small town.
While the emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2 are considerable, they are much less than in older furnaces. And there are special dust removers that reduce the fine ore dust that is an inevitable part of the process.
Even the Duisburg spokesman for the Greens party, Dieter Kautel, firmly predicts the furnace will receive the necessary operating licence without difficulty.
ThyssenKrupp says 1,200 jobs will be secured. And the new blast furnace is even easy on the eye. A colourful abstract design will hide the industrial grey beneath.