The Indian arm of industrial gas giant Linde has won an order to install a 1,000 tonnes per day (tpd) cryogenic oxygen plant at Rourkela, Odisha, eastern India.
Having accepted a Letter of Acceptance (LoA) recently with the Steel Authority of India (SAIL), Linde India’s project is to be executed in construct, operate, and maintain (COM) mode for 20 years from the date of commissioning.
The agreement also includes a provision of renewable for a further period of five years, based on a mutual agreement basis.
Equipped with a production capacity of 4.5 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of hot metal, 4.2 MTPA of crude steel, and 3.9 MTPA of saleable steel, the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) was founded in 1955 and is India’s first fully integrated steel plant.
The role of oxygen in the steel making process is essential when determining the correct level of quality in the finished product.
In the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) and EAF steelmaking processes, carbon is oxidised by oxygen to carbon monoxide (CO).
If the CO can be combusted to carbon dioxide (CO2), the energy release is three times greater and can be used in the BOF to melt more scrap which reduces the total energy to produce steel.
According to Statista, the crude steel production share using BOF in India has increased from 40.6m tonnes in 2016 to 57.4m tonnes in 2022.