"With the high-quality development of China's economy, the growth mode will change, and the reduction, decarbonization, greening, and statistics will bring qualitative changes to the steel industry. The pattern of China's steel leading the world's steel development is not far off!" On May 5, Gan Yong, honorary president of the Chinese Society of Metals and academician of the CAE Member, cheered for the high-quality development of China's steel at the National Conference on the Promotion of Electric Furnace Short Process Steelmaking held in Luzhou, Sichuan Province Encouraged and discussed a few thoughts.
Gan Yong stated that China's steel production has ranked first in the world for 27 consecutive years, accounting for half of the global market. The entire industrial chain of China's steel industry plays a crucial role in the national manufacturing industry, supporting the rapid development of China's economy and achieving green development. However, China's steel industry still faces problems: firstly, the industrial chain is not sound, especially the dependence on imports of iron ore resources, which affects the security of the supply chain. China's steel demand will enter a plateau period during the 14th Five Year Plan period, and iron ore demand will stabilize at a high level. In particular, China needs to attach great importance to the strategic guarantee of resources and take a long-term perspective in order to fully leverage the advantage of exchanging resources with the market. The second issue is that the quality of high-end products is unstable, and the "bottleneck" products have not been resolved. There is still a significant gap between China's high-end steel materials and foreign countries. Although it has been researched and developed through "bottleneck" research and development and has a certain production capacity, there is still a gap in consistency and stability, and it cannot fully meet the needs of users.
From Gan Yong's perspective, developing cooperation between China and Russia in the steel industry and strengthening the development of China's short process technology is a meaningful and worth exploring path- In terms of cooperation between China and Russia, it can strengthen the security of the iron ore supply chain. According to S&P Global Market lntelligence, as of 2021, Russia has 78.6 billion tons of iron ore reserves, second only to Australia and Brazil. The iron ore region in Russia, which has a large amount of unexplored resource reserves, is expected to have a total resource reserve of over 100 billion tons. On the other hand, cooperation between China and Russia can alleviate the pressure of energy conservation and carbon reduction in China's steel industry. Russia has abundant natural gas resources. China has fully mastered the complete set of technology and process equipment for direct reduction of iron using gas based methods. After beneficiation in Russia, it can use its abundant and inexpensive natural gas to directly reduce iron ore into iron blocks and transport them back to China for electric furnace short process steelmaking. This can greatly reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions in the long process of sintering, pelletizing, blast furnace and converter in China, as well as significantly reduce transportation costs.