Characteristics of the development of the Indian steel industry

Author: Winner   Time: 2021-02-05

Electric furnace steelmaking is the common way, and direct reduced iron output  ranks first in the world.

Comparing India and China's iron and steel making process, we found that India's iron making is mainly by direct reduced iron and steel making by electric furnace (electric arc furnace or induction furnace) steelmaking; while China's iron and steel making is mainly by long process technology. This difference is mainly decided by the limitation of raw material resources.

Although India's iron ore and coal resources are rich, with the fifth largest coal reserve country in the world, India's coal is mainly thermal coal, but coking coal is extremely scarce. By coal type, Indian coking coal is mainly composed of medium-quality coking coal and semi-coke coal (equivalent to China’s lean coal and one third coking coal), the best coal with high cohesiveness (equivalent to China’s coking coal and fat coal) reserve being only 5.3 billion tons which accounting for 15.8% of the total coking coal reserves.

In addition, India's laws and regulations and bureaucratic style slowed down the development of new coal mines in India slow, plus depletion of the old coal mines , all of which have restricted the development of the blast furnace iron making industry in Indian steel industry. Therefore, the proportion of directed reduced iron output in pig iron is rising year on year with non-coking coal and non-metallurgical coke as raw materials, which made electric steelmaking the main steelmaking technology in India. In 2013, India's crude steel output was 81.3 million tons, 55.6 million tons of which are by electric furnace steel, accounting for up to 68%.

With the severe shortage of scrap steel resources and the decline of scrap steel quality, direct reduced iron (sponge iron, DRI) has become a substitute for high-quality scrap steel. It has become widely used as a high-grade raw material essential for the production of high-quality steel. India has become the world's largest sponge iron producer. In 2013, India's DRI production was 17.77 million tons, accounting for 24% of the global DRI total production.



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