Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) has signed a contract with BOC (India) Ltd, a member of Linde AG of Germany, for supply of air gases under high pressure for 15 years. This is part of the RSP’s expansion plan.
“The supply of gases is critical to the operation of iron & steel making furnaces, and the award of this oxygen plant contract is an important milestone for our expansion project”, said plant managing director SN Singh.
The BOC will set up two state-of-the-art cryogenic air separation plants (oxygen plant) under the BOO (build-own-operate) basis for supplying of gases. This is for the first time that a project has been taken up on the BOO basis at RSP.
The two plants, planned with 700 tonnes per day (TPD) capacity each, will supply 1400 TPD of oxygen, 600 TPD of nitrogen and 17 TPD of argon to meet the increased production of hot metal and crude steel envisaged under the expansion plan.
Oxygen generated at the plants will mainly be used in new blast furnace (BF-5), new BOF (BOF-3) and new continuous casting shop (CCS-3). Nitrogen will be used in BF-5, BOF-3 and new coke-oven, while argon in BOF-3 and CCS-3.
After modernisation and expansion, the hot metal production capacity of the steel plant will go up to 4.5 million tonne per annum, while that of crude steel will be 4.2m tonne.
“Timely completion of the projects related to supply of high-pressure gases will immensely help in reaping the benefits of expansion,” the managing director said.