The end of the blast furnace era?

Ironmaking and Steelmaking journal publishes Rachel Waugh’s paper on the fate of blast furnaces on Taylor & Francis Online.

Rachel Waugh’s paper 'The end of the blast furnace era?' has been published by the journal Ironmaking and Steelmaking as an article on Taylor & Francis Online.

Rachel’s paper explores the underlying drivers of steel production to predict the fate of the blast furnace as a steelmaking route. Steel production is driven by demand for stocks of steel products and increases in steel stocks are driven by population growth and economic development. However, long-term saturation of steel demand is expected and, with an increase in the availability of end-of-life scrap, the electric arc furnace route is likely to predominate. Furthermore, with increasing constraints on resource and carbon use and the need for material efficiency strategies to provide the same services with less liquid steel, we may see the end of the blast furnace era within the next 50 years.

The paper is based on research undertaken as part of the WellMet2050 project, and was delivered at the Cleveland Institution of Engineers debate in December 2014. Click here for HTML and PDF versions of the artilce.