Siemens to supply second Corex plant to China's Baosteel

Siemens Metals Technologies will supply another Corex C-3000 plant to Chinese steel producer Shanghai Baosteel Pudong Iron and Steel Co. Ltd. (Pudong Steel). The new contract comes within seven weeks following the successful start-up of the first Corex C-3000 plant.

The new plant will also have a nominal production capacity of 1.5 million tons of hot metal per year and will be built next to the existing facility at Luojing in Shanghai. The Siemens project scope includes engineering, the supply of key process equipment and advisory services. The plant start-up is scheduled for mid-2010. The order value is in double-digit million Euro figures.

Siemens says a decisive reason for the receipt of the second Corex order was the positive experience of Baosteel with the first, recently started up Corex C-3000 plant - the largest in the world - where the advantages of the Corex Process, namely the reduced production costs through the use of coal instead of coke as well as the significantly lower environmental emissions compared with the blast furnace route, could be demonstrated.

Pudong Steel is a subsidiary company of Baosteel Group Corporation  - the largest steel producer in China. In order to increase the output of hot metal to approximately three million tons per year at the Luojing site, Baosteel decided to install a second Corex C-3000 facility next to existing facility. This will allow for an optimised plant infrastructure and raw material logistics of the new Luojing iron and steel works. Hot metal from both Corex plants will be processed to steel in the adjacent steel works.

The project scope for Siemens Metals Technologies includes process engineering, engineering of key plant areas and the design and supply of core equipment and components.

These includes oxygen burners, screw conveyors for the coal and reduced iron, two Gimbal-charging systems (one for the charging of burden into the reduction shaft and the second for the charging of coal into the melter gasifier), the dust-recycling system and various dust- and gas-lock armatures. Electrical equipment for Level 1 and Level 2 automation in addition to measurement and control instrumentation will also be supplied. Finally, advisory services for erection and plant start-up will round off the Siemens project scope.

Metals Technologies (MT), a Business Unit of the Siemens Division Industry Solutions (IS), is one of the world's leading engineering and plant-building companies for the iron and steel industry, the flat-rolling sector of the aluminum industry and open-cast mining. MT, which was created from the integration of Voest-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau, Linz/Austria, with the electrical engineering product business and automation solutions of Siemens, provides a comprehensive range of supplies and services for metallurgical processes, automation solutions and services for the entire life-cycle of industrial plants.