Salzgitter will replace the blast furnace A lining

German steelmaker Salzgitter will replace the lining of blast furnace A in the summer of 2023 – maintenance is likely to continue until September. Kallanish reports about it.

At the same time, the company will resume the operation of blast furnace C, which has been idle since 2019, which is scheduled for May 2023. A restart of this blast furnace was discussed in 2021 and 2022, but it never happened. Salzgitter does not yet have an answer to the question of whether it will remain in operation after the maintenance of blast furnace A is completed.

“We are restarting blast furnace C in May. When blast furnace A comes back into operation, we will see if we can support the operation of BF C, but the market is not so far in sight,” noted the executive director of Salzgitter Gunnar Grebler.

As another measure to maintain the stability of production volumes during the service life of one of the blast furnaces, the company will produce slabs in advance and store them at the enterprise from the fall of 2022. In addition, Salzgitter can use slabs from Hüttenwerke Krupp-Mannesmann (HKM), the Duisburg plant, owned with Thyssenkrupp Steel and Vallourec.

The move will precede the company’s long-term transition to low-carbon technologies, which will eventually lead to the abandonment of blast furnaces in favor of direct reduction iron plants and electric arc furnaces. So, as Grebler pointed out, this will be the last lining replacement Salzgitter will ever perform.

In 2022 financial year Salzgitter Group received net profit of €1.08 billion compared to €586.1 million in the previous year. The company’s external sales increased by 29% y/y – up to €12.6 billion. At the same time, in this period, the company reduced steel production by 9.4% y/y – to 6.11 million tons.

According to the company’s statement, the market environment in the second half of 2022 was affected by high inflation, record energy prices and related uncertainty in the market, which was accompanied by a decrease in steel prices. The first quarter of the 2022/2023 financial year was characterized by high demand.

The German steel company Salzgitter Group and the Canadian mining corporation Baffinland Iron Mines will cooperate in the production of green steel. The German steel company aims to achieve almost zero carbon emissions by 2033.