The Indian arm of industrial gas giant Linde has won an order to install a 1,000 tonnes per day (tpd) cryogenic oxygen plant at Rourkela, Odisha, eastern India.

Having accepted a Letter of Acceptance (LoA) dated 25^th August, 2023, with the Steel Authority of India (SAIL), Linde India’s project is to be executed on construct, operate and maintain (COM) mode for 20 years from the date of commissioning.

The agreement also includes a provision of renewable for a further period of five years, based on mutual agreement basis.

Equipped with a production capacity of 4.5 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of hot metal, 4.2 MTPA of crude steel and 3.9 MTPA of saleable steel, the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) was founded in 1955 and is India’s first fully integrated steel plant.

The role of oxygen in the steel making process is essential when determining the correct level of quality in the finished product.

In the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) and EAF steelmaking processes, carbon is oxidised by oxygen to carbon monoxide (CO).

If the CO can be combusted to carbon dioxide (CO2), the energy release is three times greater and can be used in the BOF to melt more scrap which reduces the total energy to produce steel.

According to Statista, the crude steel production share using BOF in India has increased from 40.6m tonnes in 2016 to 57.4m tonnes in 2022.

Recently, India surpassed China as the top developer of coal-based steelmaking capacity. A report from the India Times suggests that the country holds 40% of coal-based blast-furnace-basic BOF capacity under development, while China is responsible for 39%.

However, this coincides with the global need to shrink the world’s coal-based steelmaking capacity.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario, the total share of EAF capacity should reach 53% by 2050, meaning that nearly 350m metric tonnes of coal-based capacity would need to be retired or cancelled and 610m metric tonnes of EAF capacity added.

In its report ‘Green steel: the road to Net Zero’, Linde Hydrogen outlined potential technologies that can help reduce emissions through improved efficiency – and are able to support a move to clean hydrogen in the future.

The company’s OXYGON product line uses pure oxygen instead of air for combustion and because airborne nitrogen is no longer part of the process, “you reduce flue gas volumes and you intensify the combustion, creating a more efficient heating process,” said David Muren, Linde’s Europe, Middle East and Africa Director of R&D Metals and Combustion.

The company claims that by applying oxyfuel and hot oxygen technologies to steelmaking, carbon emissions could be cut by up to 60%, potentially saving the steel industry 200m metric tonnes of CO2 a year.

“Such savings could be even larger when using ‘green oxygen’, meaning oxygen produced with renewable energy,” added Linde.

Linde India also recently hit record high shares after winning a contract with Indian Oil Corporation.