Saldanha Steel
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Saldanha Steel was a South African steel company originally formed as a partnership between Iscor Limited and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC). Saldanha Steel is now part of Mittal Steel South Africa, which in turn is part of global steel company Arcelor-Mittal.
Operations
The R6,8bn Saldanha Steel facilities, situated on the Cape west coast roughly 10 km away from Langebaan Lagoon's ecologically sensitive wetlands, has been designed to produce 1.25 million tons of hot-rolled carbon steel coil per year. The mill was commissioned in 1998.
Following the unbundling of Iscor's mining and steel assets, the Industrial Development Corp. has now become a major shareholder of Iscor Ltd.
It is one of the few steel making plants which do not use blast furnaces and coke. The factory comprises the process parts (right to left on image above when scrolled)
- Ore storage and processing in the large silos
- Midrex process in the smaller tower which yields solid iron
- Corex Process in the large tower with the pyramid. This is iron ore with coal and oxygen which produces liquid iron.
- Flaring off the excess CO gases which cannot be used anymore for energy in the tower left of the Corex tower
- Meltshop, the building left of the flaring tower, consists of two Electric arc furnaces for melting the iron products again from the Corex and Midrex processes.
- Sheet rolling facility in the fairy like building left with all the pyramids. Starting with hot rolling of slabs up to 90cm wide and 7.5cm thickness, finally to millimeter thin sheet rolls which are stored in the very left of the building and shipped to the customer.
- The tall tower in front of the rolling mill building is the air separation plant to elemental oxygen, nitrogen and argon.