Steel Manufacturers in Japan to Expand their Production Capability by Repair

The Japanese steel manufacturers pulled up the crude steel production capability per blast furnace by repair and have responded to the increase of steel demand centering on high class steel. There are seven sets of blast furnaces with 5000 cubic meters of the furnace volume in Japan now. There were only three sets ten years ago. And now there are some repair plans of blast furnace repair to pull up the furnace volume to more than 5000 cubic meters. The blast furnace of the level of 2000 cubic meters is main facilities in the world. So only Japan is outstanding. Japanese manufactures also improves their energy efficiency by increasing the cubic contents of the furnaces. They challenge an independent energy-saving target and aim at simultaneous pursuit of high production and environmental correspondence.The crude steel production capability in the world is expanding. The blast furnace which has more than 2000 cubic meters of blast volume has increased by 11 sets from 1995 to 169 sets now. In the meantime, China increased 26 sets of them and it has 36 sets now. There are only 2 sets of 5000 cubic meters class of blast furnace and 7 sets of 400 cubic meters class in the world except Japan. Many countries have the level of 2000 cubic meters (there are 104 sets; it occupies 61 % of whole blast furnaces). The blast furnace which is working in Japan is totally 28 sets. Nippon Steel Group has 9 sets, JFE Steel Group has 9 sets, Sumitomo Metal Industries Group has 5 sets, Kobe Steel has 3 sets and Nisshin Steel has 2 sets. Among those, 60 percent of the whole has cubic meters or more and the ratio of a large sized blast furnace is higher than other countries. In Japan, manufactures does not construct new blast furnace but they improves the capability per set and pursue the efficiency. There will be 12 sets of blast furnaces with 5000 cubic meters class in near future in Japan and total furnace volume will increase by more than 5000 cubic meters in total. Although about 4 million tonnes of crude steel production capability per year is likely to increase, they corresponds to the high-class steel demand by these.