Future steel
Blast furnaces have been used for two millennium to produce pig iron, a crucial step in the steel production process, from iron ore by combining fuel, charcoal, and air. Modern methods use coke instead of charcoal, which has proven to be a great deal more efficient and is credited with contributing to the British Industrial Revolution. Once the iron is refined, converters are used to create steel from the iron. During the late 19th and early 20th century there were many widely used methods such as the Bessemer process and the Siemens-Martin process. However, basic oxygen steelmaking, in which pure oxygen is fed to the furnace to limit impurities, has generally replaced these older systems. Electric arc furnaces are a common method of reprocessing scrap metal to create new steel. They can also be used for converting pig iron to steel, but they use a great deal of electricity (about 440 kWh per metric ton), and are thus generally only economical when there is a plentiful supply of cheap electricity. But new modern techniques of producing steel promises a new turning point in the steel making industries. There are many organizations dedicated in producing our future steel with many appealing properties. A day will come when we will rely solely in such new steel.