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24-543: Teesside Beam Mill ( TBM ) is a steel reheating and rolling plant located at Lackenby , on Teesside , North Yorkshire , England. The plant was set up in the 1950s by the Dorman Long company and began full production in 1958, making beams for building projects. The plant produces around 750,000 tonnes (830,000 tons) of steel products per year, and is the United Kingdom's only producer of large steel sections for

48-421: A lance over the molten pig iron inside the converter. Exothermic heat is generated by the oxidation reactions during blowing. The basic oxygen steel-making process is as follows: Earlier converters, with a false bottom that can be detached and repaired, are still in use. Modern converters have a fixed bottom with plugs for argon purging. The energy optimization furnace (EOF) is a BOF variant associated with

72-621: A professor at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin ), returned to Switzerland and accepted a seat on the board of Roll AG , the country's largest steel mill. In 1947 he purchased the first small 2.5-ton experimental converter from the US, and on April 3, 1948 the new converter produced its first steel. The new process could conveniently process large amounts of scrap metal with only

96-707: A small proportion of primary metal necessary. In the summer of 1948, Roll AG and two Austrian state-owned companies, VÖEST and ÖAMG, agreed to commercialize the Durrer process. By June 1949, VÖEST developed an adaptation of Durrer's process, known as the LD (Linz-Donawitz) process. In December 1949, VÖEST and ÖAMG committed to building their first 30-ton oxygen converters. They were put into operation in November 1952 (VÖEST in Linz) and May 1953 (ÖAMG, Donawitz) and temporarily became

120-416: A temperature of 1,300 °C (2,370 °F), to make I-beams (girders) for the construction industry. Ingots ranging in weight from 5.6–21.3 tonnes (6.2–23.5 tons) are brought to temperature and rolled in a primary mill, these are then sent to a roughing and finishing mill, before being hot sawn to the customers required length, and then coolled. Since the closure of the adjacent Teesside Steelworks at Redcar,

144-570: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Basic oxygen process The process was invented in 1948 by Swiss engineer Robert Durrer and commercialized in 1952–1953 by the Austrian steelmaking company VOEST and ÖAMG . The LD converter, named after the Austrian towns Linz and Donawitz (a district of Leoben ) is a refined version of the Bessemer converter where blowing of air

168-563: Is replaced with blowing oxygen. It reduced capital cost of the plants and smelting time, and increased labor productivity. Between 1920 and 2000, labor requirements in the industry decreased by a factor of 1,000, from more than 3 man-hours per metric ton to just 0.003. By 2000 the basic oxygen furnace accounted for 60% of global steel output. Modern furnaces will take a charge of iron of up to 400 tons and convert it into steel in less than 40 minutes, compared to 10–12 hours in an open hearth furnace . The basic oxygen process developed outside of

192-624: The Gladesville Bridge over the Paramatta River in New South Wales (just upstream from Sydney Harbour Bridge . It was the first time that beams of that length had been rolled in that type of steel. By the 21st century, the beam mill was the only plant in the United Kingdom capable of producing large steel sections for the building and construction industry. The merger of British Steel and Hoogovens to form Corus

216-461: The Scunthorpe plant some 120 kilometres (75 mi) to the south has sent semi-finished steel to TBM via train, though some slab deliveries from Scunthorpe had started in the early 2000s. The plant produced 1,000,000 tonnes (1,100,000 tons) of girders in 1960, 520,000 tonnes (570,000 tons) in 1969 and 1977, 600,000 tonnes (660,000 tons) in 1989, and 750,000 tonnes (830,000 tons) in 2006. In 2023

240-476: The atomosphere. The owners of the Teesside Beam Mill, British Steel, announced in November 2023 their intention to stop making primary steel using the basic oxygen process at their Scunthorpe plant, and instead to utilise two Electric arc furnaces (EAF) to produce semi-finished steel from scrap metal. One of these EAF plants would be built adjacent to Teesside Beam Mill and would be used to supply

264-504: The beam plant was started by Dorman Long in 1954, with the mill being built from 1955 onwards. The mill was completed in 1958, with an eventual cost of £18 million. It was built adjacent to the Lackenby steel plant to enable steel ingots to be shipped in to the facility from the open-hearth plant next door, and was opened by Alexander Fleck who was chairman of ICI (ICI had a new plant under construction at nearby Wilton ). Originally

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288-639: The building industry. The Teesside Beam Mill was developed after the Second World War , on a strip of land at Lackenby, sandwiched between the Middlesbrough to Redcar railway line to the north, and the A1085 trunk road to the south. The narrow land measured 680 acres (280 ha) across, providing some 2,215 acres (896 ha) in total, with the buildings arranged diagonally between the two transport modes so as maximise land space. Groundwork for

312-499: The creation of new beams from 18 hours to three hours. British Steel have put forward a proposal to take green hydrogen to power the plant instead of natural gas. This is projected to commence in 2024, with the hydrogen being produced nearby on Teesside. The TBM plant requires an energy consumption of 1.8 gigajoules (500 kWh) per 1-tonne (1.1-ton) of steel rolled, which needs 45.6 cubic metres (1,610 cu ft) of natural gas, releasing 2.02 kilograms (4.5 lb) of carbon into

336-498: The feedstock metal for the TBM and another British Steel plant at Skinningrove . This would mean the closure of the Scunthorpe plant with the loss of 2,000 jobs, and the cessation of semi-finished steel from Lincolnshire through to Teesside on freight trains, as the primary metal for the beam mill would be sourced from the adjacent plant EAF located nearby. In April 2024, the EAF plant was given

360-590: The go-ahead, with a view to being operational in 2025. The EAF plant is slated to be 210 feet (64 m) tall, and cover an area of 370,000 square feet (34,000 m). Lackenby Lackenby is a small village in Redcar and Cleveland , North Yorkshire , England. It is situated to the immediate east of Eston and Middlesbrough and immediately to the west of Lazenby . 54°34′N 1°08′W  /  54.567°N 1.133°W  / 54.567; -1.133 This Redcar and Cleveland location article

384-459: The leading edge of the world's steelmaking, causing a surge in steel-related research. Thirty-four thousand businesspeople and engineers visited the VÖEST converter by 1963. The LD process reduced processing time and capital costs per ton of steel, contributing to the competitive advantage of Austrian steel. VÖEST eventually acquired the rights to market the new technology. Errors by the VÖEST and

408-698: The molten metal and removing phosphorus impurities. In the Soviet Union, some experimental production of steel using the process was done in 1934, but industrial use was hampered by lack of efficient technology to produce liquid oxygen. In 1939, the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa perfected the design of the centrifugal turboexpander . The process was put to use in 1942–1944. Most turboexpanders in industrial use since then have been based on Kapitsa's design and centrifugal turboexpanders have taken over almost 100% of industrial gas liquefaction, and in particular

432-425: The plant had around 400 people working there. A new reheat furnace was built at the plant between 1984 and 1985, costing £17 million (equivalent to £65,059,000 in 2023), and the whole plant was modernised in the late 1980s at a cost of £69 million (equivalent to £216,830,000 in 2023), and a new high technology mill was completed in the summer of 1991. The new process in the mill reduced lead-in time for

456-578: The plant rolled steel for the bridge building industry, but later the plant specialised in beams for the construction industry. Its first project was to supply steel beams of 75 feet (23 m) length for the Catterick Bypass of the A1 road in North Yorkshire, in 1958. Another of its earlier projects was to supply high-tensile beams between 45 feet (14 m) and 60 feet (18 m) long for

480-486: The production of liquid oxygen for steelmaking. Big American steelmakers were late adopters of the new technology. The first oxygen converters in the US were launched at the end of 1954 by McLouth Steel in Trenton, Michigan , which accounted for less than 1% of the national steel market. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel introduced the oxygen process in 1964. By 1970, half of the world's and 80% of Japan's steel output

504-807: The traditional "big steel" environment. It was developed and refined by a single man, Swiss engineer Robert Durrer , and commercialized by two small steel companies in allied-occupied Austria , which had not yet recovered from the destruction of World War II . In 1856, Henry Bessemer had patented a steelmaking process involving oxygen blowing for decarbonizing molten iron (UK Patent No. 2207). For nearly 100 years commercial quantities of oxygen were not available or were too expensive, and steelmaking used air blowing. During WWII German (Karl Valerian Schwarz), Belgian ( John Miles ) and Swiss ( Durrer and Heinrich Heilbrugge) engineers proposed their versions of oxygen-blown steelmaking, but only Durrer and Heilbrugge brought it to mass-scale production. In 1943, Durrer, formerly

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528-520: The ÖAMG management in licensing their technology made control over its adoption in Japan impossible. By the end of the 1950s, the Austrians lost their competitive edge. In the original LD process, oxygen was blown over the top of the molten iron through the water-cooled nozzle of a vertical lance. In the 1960s, steelmakers introduced bottom-blown converters and developed inert gas blowing for stirring

552-593: Was completed by 1999, and in the first year of operation, the Teesside Cast Products (TCP) business lost money, so a restructuring programme was initiated, but this did not include the TBM, and management of the mill was aligned away from TCP under the Scunthorpe operations. By the early 2000s, the plant was taking semi-finished steel from either the Teesside or Scunthorpe Steelworks, melting it at

576-497: Was produced in oxygen converters. In the last quarter of the 20th century, use of basic oxygen converters for steel production was gradually, partially replaced by the electric arc furnace using scrap steel and iron. In Japan the share of LD process decreased from 80% in 1970 to 70% in 2000; worldwide share of the basic oxygen process stabilized at 60%. Basic oxygen steelmaking is a primary steelmaking process for converting molten pig iron into steel by blowing oxygen through

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