Cherepovets Steel Mill Reduces Energy Consumption by 25%
03/19/2012 - ОАО Severstal’s Cherepovets Steel Mill has reduced specific steelmaking energy consumption to 5.620 Gcal per tonne, down 25% from 1999 levels, the launch year of the company’s energy-saving program.
ОАО Severstal announced that its Cherepovets Steel Mill, part of the Severstal Russian Steel Division and one of the world's largest standalone integrated steelworks by capacity, has reduced specific steelmaking energy consumption* to 5.620 Gcal per tonne, down 25% from 1999 levels, the launch year of the company’s energy-saving program.
Cherepovets Steel Mill reduced specific energy consumption by 1.3% in 2011 alone. For the production of 1 tonne of steel, the facility reduced the consumption of natural gas by 1.4 % (ca. 3 cu meter3; oxygen by 6.7% (ca. 4 cu meter3); and electric power by 0.8% (ca. 2 kW-hours).
The company said its ability to significantly reduce energy consumption is the result of investment as well as organizational and technological measures aimed at saving fuel (e.g., in the sintering process and lime roasting), oxygen and electric power (steelmaking).
“Having taken a number of measures for upgrading equipment, implementing new energy saving technologies, discarding inefficient production facilities and using modern automatic systems to control the consumption of energy resources, Cherepovets Steel Mill considerably reduced energy consumption and became a leader in this parameter among Russian steelmakers,” commented Andrei Lutsenko, Manufacturing Director and Chief Engineer, Division Severstal Russian Steel.
According to Lutsenko, the annual reduction in energy consumption is the company’s real contribution to solving the important macroeconomic task for the efficient use and conservation of energy resources, and also for the minimization of ecological stress.
According to the 2011 fundamental performance rating offered by Interfax-ERA, Severstal was a leader among the enterprises of Russian ferrous metallurgy, ranking 16th among the top 100 real-sector companies.
(*) This is a universal energy efficiency index. It is expressed in Gigacalories (109 cal) per ton of steel and calculated as a ratio of the total amount of consumed heat/energy to the total volume of production (steel).
ОАО Severstal, one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel related mining companies, holds assets in Russia and the USA, in Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Italy, Liberia and Brazil. Severstal reported revenue of $13,573 million and EBITDA of $3,263 million in 2010. In that same year, Severstal’s crude steel production reached 14.7 million tonnes.
