Recently, Shougang Jingtang announced a significant breakthrough in low-carbon steelmaking of the BF-BOF route. The company successfully completed a seven consecutive heats of continuous casting of automotive interstitial-free (IF) steel using a converter process with over 50% scrap steel.

Within the context of China’s goals for carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, the adoption of high-proportion pellet technology in blast furnaces and high-scrap-ratio technology in converters effectively reduces carbon emissions in the BF-BOF route, providing crucial support for the growth of low-carbon steel production. Shougang Jingtang is committed to the research and development of low-carbon products, aligning its production with customer demand for high-quality materials and reduced emissions. Guided by the national carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and Shougang Group’s long-term strategy, the company focuses on high-efficiency, high-quality, intelligent, and green manufacturing. Shougang Jingtang has kept breaking through key low-carbon technological barriers, developing advantageous low-carbon products, and accelerating the cultivation of core competitiveness in green and low-carbon technologies.

To maximize carbon reduction across the entire production process, Shougang Jingtang’s manufacturing, steelmaking, technical center, and energy and environment departments collaborated to design and implement high scrap ratio processes in steelmaking. Since 2023, Shougang Jingtang has continuously pursued carbon reduction and emission mitigation in its steelmaking processes while ensuring product quality. Through persistent research and development efforts focusing on continuous production with high scrap ratios, the company conducted over 30 converter high-scrap-ratio trials. While keeping consistent converter endpoint composition, the company has established a unique, proven converter steelmaking process featuring high scrap steel ratios and low carbon content by employing a multi-pronged strategy to solve challenges. This has culminated in the successful seven-heat continuous casting of low-carbon steel using a converter process with over 50% scrap steel and the production of automotive side panels with over 50% scrap steel. The products encompass automotive steel (including outer panels), tinplate, home appliance steel, pickled steel, and hot-rolled steel.

The R&D team collaborated on process design and quality assurance during production. Leveraging the company’s advantages of the dual-converter process within the clean steel production platform with desilication, dephosphorization and desulfurization, the team ensured thermal balance of the converters and the cleanliness of the molten steel effectively. The successful seven-heat continuous casting of automotive IF steel with over 50% scrap steel marks a significant advancement in Shougang Jingtang’s capacity for mass production of low-carbon automotive steel.