Pilot mill in Michigan aims to make metal cheaper, cleaner
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Staff -- Purchasing, 9/1/2005
UP Steel recently received a Michigan Energy Efficiency Grant of $530,000 to move forward with development of a pilot steel plant that will use microwaves to process iron ore at the Eagle Mills facility in the town of Negaunee on the state’s Upper Peninsular.
Eagle Mills had been used for years to make pellets from iron ore from the now-closed Republic Mine. A scrap company, Schneider’s Iron & Metal of Kingsford, Mich., now owns the facility. Using technology developed at Michigan Technological University, a private, Negaunee-based company led by Dan Hintsala, president, already has invested $100,000 in the steel project. Most iron ore in the Upper Peninsula is high in phosphorus, which makes it difficult to process in a traditional blast furnace. According to engineers, if the phosphorus makes it through to the molten phase, the steel will be brittle. "The new microwave process eliminates that problem because the phosphorus is more easily removed from the steel," Scott Huang, senior research scientist at Michigan Tech, tells the Associated Press. "This new, simplified process translates into less capital cost, higher productivity, less environmental pollution and treatment cost, higher energy efficiency, and lower production cost." Microwave processing technology originally was developed in 2001 when the U.S. Department of Energy gave a $600,000 grant to Michigan Tech to develop it as an energy efficient and environmentally superior process. Professor Jiann-Yang Hwang says the process eliminates the intermediate steps of coking, sintering, blast-furnace iron making, and basic oxygen furnace steelmaking. "The new microwave-assisted electric arc furnace and steel-making technology is a revolutionary change from current technology," Hwang tells the Detroit News. "This technology can produce molten steel directly from shippable agglomerate." Agglomerate is a mass of fused material.
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