China News Service, Tangshan, September 27 (Reporters Chen Lin, Niu Lin, Ai Guangde) The world's steel looks to China, and Chinese steel looks to Tangshan. At a time when the steel industry has basically bid farewell to extensive scale expansion and is in the critical stage of "reducing quantity and improving quality", how the steel city develops has attracted attention from the outside world.
Qian'an City, Tangshan City, Hebei Province, located at the southern foot of Yanshan Mountain, is a typical resource-based city that originated from mining and prospered from steel. As an important steel industry base in China, there are currently 6 local full-process steel companies and 24 steel deep processing companies. The reporter recently visited local steel companies and found that after the reduction of crude steel production capacity, products are moving towards high-end products, production is developing towards intelligence, and the industry is transforming into green. These are new changes taking place in this northern steel city.
In the production workshop of Tangshan Yanyang Cold Rolling Co., Ltd., the first 1750mm acid continuous rolling production line invested by a Chinese private enterprise is packaging a roll of cold hard coils as thin as a cicada at a speed of 25 meters per second. There are only a few workers working on the more than 450-meter production line.
Factory director Liu Xiaofeng said that if iron ore is rolled into ordinary thick steel according to the conventional production path, one ton will cost about 3,100 yuan, and this production line allows steel to extend from hot rolling to cold rolling and become high-end high-quality steel used in home appliances, automobiles and other industries. "This 0.25 mm thick high-quality steel can be sold for about 3,600 yuan per ton, and after galvanizing, it can reach more than 4,000 yuan per ton. At present, it is mainly exported to countries such as South Korea and the United Arab Emirates."
Liu Xiaofeng, who has worked in the steel industry for 30 years, worked in steel plants in Tianjin, Lingyuan, Liaoning and other places in his early years, and came to Qian'an 20 years ago. In his eyes, after experiencing the reduction of crude steel in Qian'an, "now the air quality has improved, the proportion of high-quality steel has increased, and steel companies have also embarked on the road of green transformation."
It is understood that the annual production capacity of Qian'an Iron and Steel has been reduced from 45 million tons of crude steel at the peak to about 30 million tons now, of which the proportion of fine steel has increased to 46.7%, promoting the transformation of products from "raw material grade" to "material grade". All six full-process steel companies have achieved Grade A environmental performance and have built national-level green factories.
Digital transformation is a must-answer question for Qian'an Steel Enterprises. In the dispatch and command center of Qian'an Iron and Steel Company of Shougang Co., Ltd., as the data on the main control screen changes in real time, the staff is digitally controlling the production process. Zhang Guohong, deputy director of the company's digital transformation center, said that in the past, some processes relied mainly on manual experience. Now the artificial intelligence management system can collect data in real time, allowing algorithms to replace experience, save costs, and also reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Data shows that Qian'an Iron and Steel Enterprises have implemented AI demonstration applications in 45 scenarios in 12 processes including ironmaking and steelmaking.
In Qian'an, circular economy is reshaping the value chain of the steel industry. With the high-quality development of the local steel industry, more than 20 million tons of various solid wastes produced every year by six full-process steel companies are also turning "waste" into treasure. Zhou Shibo, head of supply and procurement at Qian'an Weisheng Solid Waste Environmental Protection Industrial Co., Ltd., said that the company cooperates with Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology Beijing and other universities to turn industrial solid waste such as steel slag and water slag into new materials through new research and development technology. “Behind the ‘eating up and squeezing out’ metallurgical solid waste is the continuous extension of the circular economy chain.”
In recent years, Qian'an has also relied on coke oven gas produced in the steel and coking industries to purify and recover industrial by-product hydrogen, convert it into clean energy, and explore green and low-carbon transformation paths for heavy industrial cities. Bian Yueqin, production director of Tangshan Zhongrong Technology Co., Ltd., said that the company removes impurities from the coke oven gas sent by coking manufacturers and then uses a purification process to extract high-purity hydrogen for fuel cells. It can produce 5,350 tons of fuel cell hydrogen per year.
According to the relevant person in charge of Qian'an Municipal Development and Reform Bureau, Qian'an City's total annual hydrogen production capacity currently reaches 24,000 tons, mainly industrial by-product hydrogen.
