The Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology (IMMT), Bhubaneswar has earned the distinction of being the first in the country to develop an eco-friendly “green steel”.
The pollution-free process for production green steel has been developed by a team of scientists led by Senior Principal Scientist Dr Bhagyadhar Bhoi under the guidance of IMMT Director Prof Barada Kanta Mishra.
The scientists including Dr PS Mukherjee, Pravat Behera, Chinmay Sarangi, Dr Devi Prasad Das and Priyanka Rajput had been working since 2010 on the project being sponsored by the Union Ministry of Steel.
The Thermal Plasma Process in the laboratory scale has been developed to produce steel eliminating CO2 gas emission by using hydrogen gas as reductant in place of coal, said Dr Bhoi. Asserting that the Thermal Hydrogen Plasma Smelting Process developed at the IMMT is first of its kind in India, he said the new technology innovation has already been patented.
The green steel would make a breakthrough in the iron and steel industry after the process is scaled up to commercial level, he said.
Stating that the team has achieved the purity of the metal to the extent of 98.67 per cent, Dr Bhoi said it is planned to upgrade the process to Kg scale by 2014.
The Thermal Hydrogen Plasma Smelting Process would replace the conventional process of steelmaking where carbon in the form of coal is used as the main source of energy as well as reductant for the production of steel.
The Indian steel industry is consuming 6.9 gcal per tonne of crude steel (tcs) against 4.5 gcel/ tcs of world average and emitting 62/7 tonne/tcs CO2 gas against 1.75 tonne/tcs of the world average. In order to avoid pollution, it is the need for the hour to develop an innovative technology to replace the conventional process in steelmaking, Dr Bhaoi said.
A decision on commercial production of the green steel is expected to be taken by March next year, according to sources in the Union Steel Ministry. India, the fourth largest producer of crude steel preceded by China, Japan and the USA, in its draft National Steel Policy has pegged the country’s steelmaking capacity in the range of 244-281 MTA by 2015-26 to help increase the per capita consumption to 150 kg.