Day 194 - Whyalla Steel Mill and Point Lowly/Port Bonython

We had a car service today so we filled in part of the day with a visit to Arrium's/OneSteel's steel mill at Whyalla.  The site tour was in a bus and it was difficult to photograph so this will be a potted version of the process.

Ore from local mines, haematite from the northern Middleback Ranges and magnetite from the southern range mines comes to the site, haematite by rail and magnetite by slurry pipeline.  The slurry is made into pellets. The ore and pellets (1:4 ratio) are mixed with fluxes (limestone is imported from Japan), local silica, dolomite and coke, also made on site from coal, and fed into a Blast Furnace.  The resultant molten metal then has alloys added eg ferro silicon and ferro manganese and as much scrap iron as is possible, and is converted into steel in a Basic Oxygen Steelmaking plant to make steel.  They make up to 90 different grades of steel.  The steel is then formed into billets or rolled in a rolling mill, while hot, into various structural products eg railway lines, beams, columns etc.  The rolling mill, unfortunately, was not operating.  Most impressive was the downloading of the coke ovens and the quenching of the coke, with the latter providing a plume of white water vapour as the water met the 1400 degree coke.  Unfortunately we were not taken inside to see the furnaces being unloaded.

The process is dirty, the site is dirty but we remained clean and cool in our Toyota bus.  It was an informative experience.  It made us realise why steel is so expensive.

171014 The blast furnace

171014 Another view of the blast furnace

171014 Coking ovens - Please disregard the bus's window pillar 

171014 Unloading a coke oven.  The hot coke is then quenched 
with water.  Sorry about the reflection

171014 Quenching the coke

171014 Quenched coke being delivered to the coke bunker

171014 Cooled coke in the bunker

171014 Steel sections

171014 Steel billets

171014 Different profiles used in the rolling process

Once we recovered both our car from the service centre and ourselves from the cost of the service, we took a quick trip out to Point Lowly Lighthouse, Santos' Port Bonython liquids processing plant and Fitzgerald Bay. The Santos plant processes the liquids, oil and condensate, produced from its Cooper Basin operations, which are delivered to Port Bonython via a 650km pipeline.

171014 Santos' Port Bonython liquids plant

171014 Point Lowly Lighthouse

171014 The steel plant from the road to Point Lowly 

171014 Fitzgerald Bay - some aquaculture done here

Todays trivia:  All the fresh water used by the steel plant and the Whyalla region comes, by pipeline, from Morgan on the Murray River about 375km away.