New Era for Steel?

To old steel hands used to the authoritative roar of a huge blast furnace, the new plant that began operating this week at Niagara Falls, Ont., neither looked nor sounded like an iron smeltery. The plant, owned by New York's Strategic Materials Corp., is the first commercial operation of a new smelting process that could open a new era for the steel industry. It could also lead to the quick building of a steel industry in underdeveloped countries. The smeltery is designed to take low-grade ores, contaminated ores, and ores so fine that they would choke a blast furnace, and produce iron so pure that it can be turned into steel in half the usual time.

When all the bugs are worked out, the smelting furnace will be the nation's biggest producer of ferrochrome, an ingredient vital to stainless steel. It will be smelting low-grade chrome ore from Africa. The output will go to Universal-Cyclops Steel Corp.

Other plants in the works that will use the new process:

P: Texas' Lone Star Steel Co. has made a deal to use the process to smelt low-grade Texas ores, the first big steelmaker to sign up.

P: Sovereign Resources, Inc. plans to build a steel plant in Anderson County, Texas, to use low-grade East Basin ores and local lignite instead of the expensive metallurgical coking coal that a blast furnace needs.

P: St. Lawrence Steel Co. will begin building this year in Quebec a 100,000-ton-a-year mill to make steel out of low-grade Canadian ore.

P: North American Coal Corp. is building a million dollar plant at Powhatan Point, Ohio, to use another Strategic Materials process to recover 40,000 tons of aluminum sulphate (alum) a year from coal wastes.

Practical Dream. The biggest test of the new process will come in Venezuela, where a Stratmat furnace is being installed in the government's new $340 million steel plant. After building the plant, the Venezuelans found that they would have to import expensive coke to run it. But with Stratmat's process, they expect to run on local poor-grade coal. If it works as expected, the government is considering converting the whole plant to the process.

Another plan that should be under way soon is a blue-sky dream of William Zeckendorf's Webb & Knapp Inc.--made practical by cheap power from Bonneville Dam and Stratmat's smelting process--to retrieve iron, copper and zinc from waste copper slag cast off by copper companies. A Webb & Knapp subsidiary, in which Stratmat is to have a minority interest, plans to build a mill in Montana and buy slag from Anaconda Co. at 25-c- a ton. The slag heap contains iron, copper and zinc ores worth an estimated $1.4 billion. Zeckendorf even hopes to sell his leftover steel slag to go into the concrete of the Government's proposed Libby Dam in Montana.

Two-Step Process. Stratmat's process is the idea of the late Metallurgist Marvin J. Udy. A Montreal millionaire, John C. Udd, became interested nine years ago and formed Strategic Materials Corp. to develop Udy's ideas.

Udy broke smelting down into two processes, v. one in the blast furnace. The first, a horizontal, slowly rotating, gas-fired kiln, removes 55% of such impurities as oxygen and sulphur from ores of such low grade that blast furnaces cannot handle them, conditions them for the second step. This is a Udy-designed electric smelting furnace that finishes the job. The slag from the electric furnace can be put through a series of similar furnaces to draw off other metals such as chrome, copper, zinc and manganese. Thus, for the first time, a smeltery can work iron ore over with the same thoroughness that an oil refinery uses to squeeze every last product out of crude oil.

Udd and Udy were a long time making a go of it. Udd poured at least $3,000,000 of his own money into Stratmat. Then, in 1957, the prestigious Koppers Co., Inc., which designs and builds steel mills, saw the possibilities and added its money to the development, in return for stock and the right to engineer and design plants using the Udy process. Shortly afterward, Frank W. Chambers, 52, a one-time Koppers executive and director of engineering at Kennecott Copper, took over as Stratmat president and set to work to make the process a commercial success.

Little Mills. Chambers is now working with businessmen in India to build as many as 15 small (150,000 tons a year) steel mills, scattered about the country, that would use local ore and coal to meet the needs of nearby markets. Each mill would cost less than $12 million. Other countries interested are Nigeria, Egypt, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and Morocco.

Thus far, more than $12 million has been poured into Strategic Materials without a cent of profit, but by the end of this year Chambers hopes to start breaking even and by next year to show some earnings. In Venezuela alone, the company expects to get a quarter of what its process saves the government, an estimated royalty of more than $1 to $1.50 per ton. Says Chambers: "We won't put Gary or Pittsburgh out of business. But we can use materials they can't, and we are heading a trend to build little mills close to raw materials and the markets."

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