BLOG: Baowu – an icon of smart steelmaking in China
C008 hot-dipped galvanized coil line can operate without light
The C008 HDG mill would not have been open to visitors if not for the arrangement of the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) as part of its interim meeting with the members over July 29-30, and it is probably the mill with the most advanced technology among Chinese steel producers.
“The tour route had been hand-picked, reviewed and approved by CISA’s chairman for the association members, just to showcase the high artificial intelligence in China’s steelmaking,” an official from the plant acting as the tour guide shared.
After the upgrading in 2016, the C008 plant is capable of operating with zero employee on the site, boasting a 720,000-850,000 tonnes/year hot-dipped galvanized steel coil capacity.
“We call it a lights-out plant for a reason, as it can operate nonstop all day long and in total darkness, unlike the usual well-lit mills, as we do not have a single employee on the ground,” a company official explained with pride.
Indeed, other than the visitors, we did not bump into a soul in the plant, just seeing a driverless bridge crane busy itself in the large and empty workshop, handling the most dangerous, dirtiest and non-ending routines of dredging, unbundling and labeling.
Visitors had been awed by the operations at the plant, with some firing questions one after another to our tour guide, but unfortunately, some questions were lost to the noisy environment with motors running.
Walking out of the dark workshop was really a relief, especially when we were ushered into an air-conditioned control centre with four employees sitting side by side in front of a long row of computers, eyes glued to the LED screens, checking out the visualized images of the facilities, reading the series of the variables, and the other six sitting in front of the decks with a large board full of buttons to remotely control the cranes and other facilities at the plant.
Four blast furnaces under control in a cool-aired room
If you think C008 rolling mill is the smartest works in Baoshan site, the steelmaking sector, supposedly the one with the most dust and all the heat, will just show you how wrong you are.
“Before this tour, I had never thought that a group of 56 workers will be all needed for the normal operations of four giant blast furnaces, each as large as about 5,000 cu m, and almost all the monitoring can easily be done in a cool-aired control centre via screens and a switch board full of control buttons,” a visitor voiced how much he had been impressed by the modern and sweat-free settings after the plant tour.
The works’ No.1 blast furnace, the nearest to the control centre could be one of the longest-serving facility as it went into operation in 1985 after eight years of construction, and also China’s largest and most advanced blast furnace back in 1980s. Two rounds of rectification and upgrading in the past 36 years has expanded its inner volume to 4,966 cu m from the vert original 4,063 cu m.
“With most of the components covered and the advanced dust-control facilities installed, white smoke through the flue is the only thing visible to us now,” a delegate commented. He used to be an intern at the works more than 30 years ago.
The No.1 blast furnace at the Baoshan steelworks
The rather eye-opening plant tour at the Baoshan steelworks is a showcase of the Chinese steel producer’s endeavors towards “bigger and better”, backed by the huge investment of over Yuan 10 billion ($1.5 billion) in the past few years for series of upgrading at its iron- and steelmaking facilities and its raw materials transmission systems at this very plant.
During the one-and-a-half-hour visit, not once had we been hurried off the main road to give way to any trucks laden with iron ore or coal, as the long pipelines above us have been transmitting raw materials from their stockyards directly to the plants, leaving all the driveways in the plant to the trucks for moving steel coils out of the works.
Gas pipelines connecting the No.1 blast furnace
“Our finished steel capacity is at about 16 million tonnes/year at this steelworks with most being cold-rolled and galvanized coils for home appliances and automobile manufacturing,” a company official shared, disclosing that hot-rolled coils are seldom sold to the market as they are with relatively lower added-values.
Baowu not after a solo, but looking for a choir
Seeing is believing, and the tour has given me the tangible and in-person experience how advanced a steel mill is about in China in that steel quality is not all that matters, environment and welfare of its employees are just as equally crucial, very much in tune with the country’s promoting intelligence manufacturing and 5G data.
It is of little wonder, thus, that Chen Derong, chairman of China Baowu and also the newly-appointed chairman of CISA, commented with confidence at the meeting on July 29 that, “I have visited many leading mills in U.S., Japan and other developed economies, and our steelmaking facilities and automation are definitely a match to theirs in every key element.”
He also marketed softly Baowu products at the event, joking that, “we should have named our steel products with color codes, as we are owning the facilities and the technology now to produce steel in any color you’d prefer.”
And, Baowu has yet come to an end with its mergers and acquisitions inside China, Chen shared, though it is already world’s No.1 with an over 100 million t/y steel capacity and subsidiaries running across the country from east to west, north to south.
“Monopolizing the market has never been our intention,” Chen said. “Instead, we want to help the industry and grow together with the other Chinese steel mills by openly sharing our fruits in low-carbon metallurgy research and development, making sure we all are competitive in and out China and sustainability is achieved in the industry.”
China produced 1.065 billion tonnes of crude steel for 2020, while Baowu contributed 115.3 million tonnes of crude steel in 2020, or 10.8% to the country’s total.
Written by Nancy Zheng, zhengmm@mysteel.com and Villanelle Xia, xiayi@mysteel.com
Edited by Hongmei Li, li.hongmei@mysteel.com
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