L&T-Paul Wurth consortium commissions India's largest blast furnace at Jamshedpur

Mumbai: The L&T-Paul Wurth consortium, formed by ECC, the construction division of L&T and Paul Wurth SA of Luxembourg, commissioned the largest blast furnace in India at Tata Steel at Jamshedpur on 31 May 2008.

With the commisioning of the new blast furnace, the existing stel making capacity of the company would increase to 10 million tonnes by the middle of 2010.

Discosing that Tata Steel also plans to set up a second steel plant at Jharkhand, Tata Steel managing director B Muthuraman said that construction at the company's proposed Orissa  plant would begin soon,   while it was progressing well at its Chattisgarh plant site.

The $7-billion L&T's consortium  with Paul Worth has had a long associtation with Tata Steel; it had previously executed the mammoth re-construction of the steel maker's blast furnace 'F' in a record time. This type of rebuilding and upgradation of a blast furnace was carried out for the first time in India.

The state-of-the-art blast furnace 'H' has a volume of 3,814cum with a rated capacity to produce 2.5 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of hot metal. The project - the first of its kind in the country was completed in a record 25 months from the 'ground-breaking' ceremony, emphasising L&T's rapid pace of operations

The blast furnace project was awarded to L&T and Paul Wurth, Italy, for design, manufacture, supply, erection, commissioning of the furnace, with auxiliary facilities on a turnkey basis.

Paul Wurth's scope covered basic engineering, supply of proprietary and special equipment as well as technical supervisory services while L&T's scope spanned detail engineering, supply/manufacture of indigenous mechanical, electrical, instrumentation and automation works including complete site services involving civil, structural and erection works.

The L&T-Paul Wurth consortium is currently executing two more 2.5-MTPA blast furnaces on a turnkey basis at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant and Bhushan Steel Plant, Meerarrumdali (Orissa), scheduled for commissioning in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

The commissioning of blast furnace 'H' marks L&T's resolve to be a significant player in ihu steel industry in its quest to become 100 MT by 2011.