Austrian steelmaking group Voestalpine has decided to relight the second blast furnace (BF) at its Donawitz site to meet growing demand for long steel, the company said on Thursday January 21.
The Donawitz site has two BFs with a total capacity of 1.5 million tonnes per year of pig iron, however, for the past seven months only one of the furnaces was operational.One of the two BFs in Donawitz, with a capacity to produce 750,000 tpy of pig iron, was under planned interim repairs from June to October and was only supposed to restart when customer demand required it to do so, the company...