oh, you were talking about europe" I was thinking about america. Yeah i imagine it's going to be a while here.
Steel mills operate in two distinct ways. The traditional production method occurs at large,
vertically integrated mills, which use ovens to heat coal into coke;1 combine the coke with iron
ore in a blast furnace to produce pig iron; and then melt the pig iron in a basic oxygen furnace to
produce liquid steel. This production process is commonly known as the Blast-Furnace/Basic
Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) method.
The alternate method occurs through “mini-mills,” which use electric arc furnaces (EAFs) to melt
steel scrap and, in some instances, use iron pellets to produce liquid steel. Unlike integrated mills,
mini-mills do not require coke ovens or blast furnaces. However, some mini-mills use a process
called direct reduction to remove oxygen from iron ore with heat from burning natural gas; the
resulting product, direct reduced iron (DRI) or sponge iron, is turned into a lump, pellet, or
briquetted form that can be transformed into liquid steel in EAFs.2
Once steel is produced in its liquid state, it is cast into rectangular slabs (long billets a few inches
on a side) or other shapes and left to cool. Rolling mills then shape the semifinished steel into a
variety of products, generally classified as either “flat” products (plate and coils of steel sheet) or
“long” products (bars, rails, wire rods). The rolled steel products often undergo additional
finishing operations, such as coating, painting, and galvanizing, to produce finished steel. Figure
1 shows the process for manufacturing iron, steel, and finished steel products.
pulled from a US government thing, seems like most cleaner methods use refined iron. Although from some quick googling, it seems like this is a preparation method for iron ore, so maybe this is just a semantics thing here.
ok, and some statistics, it seem slike 30% of US production is using vertically integrated mills, or coal based production (presumably) Seems like they're even cheaper, generally. Which is also a benefit.
So i guess overall, the steel industry is better than i expected.