A high-performing BOF installed at Baowu KISCO in China’s Yunnan Province has tapped its first heat of liquid steel.

BOF G going operational marked an important move forward in KISCO’s successful steelmaking relocation programme.

KISCO’s chairman Sulin Wang and CISDI’s president Peng Xiao attended the on-site start-up celebration and pledged to work together to create a technically and economically competitive steelmaking plant in China.

The relocation programme covers a wide range of steelmaking facilities. It will feature a 120-tonne hot metal desulphurisation station, two 120-tonne combined top-bottom-blown BOFs, two online argon blowing stations, two 120-tonne twin LFs, one 120-tonne vacuum degasser featuring dual vessels and dual covers, slag treatment and auxiliary facilities and utilities.

Annual production targets are 2.342 million tonnes of qualified liquid steel, which are required for downstream production of 2.272 million tonnes of qualified slabs, the benchmark production capacity of KISCO.

All facilities are being designed to ultra-low emissions standards, in a bid to build KISCO’s relocated meltshop to greener, low-carbon and smarter levels.

It will include the following CISDI tech:

-        primary dry dedusting and environmental cleaning tech, bringing both fume discharge concentration and recovered gas’s dust concentration to under 10mg/Nm³

-        roller press crushing and hot-closed pot method for slag treatment, enabling scrap recovery and slag re-utilisation

-        one-touch melting and intelligent production management systems with self-developed sub-lance at their core, achieving safer, smarter and more efficient steelmaking

In time the programme will produce high-tensile shock-free and premium building steels, plus a small portion of deep-processing steels.

The CISDI-built BOF G in operation at KISCO’s relocated meltshop