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:
¶ 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.
¶ 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.
¶ 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.
¶ 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¢ 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.