Joe Harder challenges some misconceptions about the future of granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) trends, highlighting some of the findings of his company’s recently released market report GBFS Focus 2030.
There are some industry sources that indicate there will be not much granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) left in the world by 2030. It is certainly a nice story from a sustainability perspective, with interesting consequences for the global cement sector, which would be faced with declining supplies of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), if that were to be true.
However, such analyses are often skewed by biases towards established markets, particularly the Western European market. Here, and to some extent in North America, the conversation is switching to green steel production. Blast-furnaces, hungry for coal and petcoke and CO2-intensive by nature, are due to be closed. The focus in these regions is now on increased use of recycled iron and steel in electric arc furnaces (EAFs).
What some researchers have failed to realise is that extrapolating the European mindset to the rest of the world does not lead to sensible conclusions regarding future GBFS supply and use. This is because Western Europe is far ahead of the global trend and not representative of the overall picture. In many markets new blast furnaces will continue to come online in the 2020s and beyond, with concomitant impacts on GBFS supplies.
The perception of Europe as having a zero-CO2 steel industry ‘just around the corner’ are also misplaced. There are falling reserves of the kinds of high-quality iron ores needed for low-intensity steel methods in Europe and there is insufficient scrap iron, so will a switch to using EAFs be possible? Others point to emergence of novel fuels, including hydrogen. However, it seems premature to consider these operating to any great extent before 2030, with widespread adoption unlikely until at least 2040. Recycling can only plug part of
the gap.
These factors point back to blast furnaces continuing to operate in Europe over the rest of the 2020s. And it must be remembered that, as iron ore qualities decline, more GBFS will be produced per tonne of steel. This means that GBFS production will not fall as rapidly as some expect. There are even industry sources that predict that blast furnaces in combination with CO2 capture and utilisation / storage (CCUS) will be the technology of the future. If realised, this would result in even higher GBFS volumes in the future. However, there is still great cost in doing this.
GBFS Focus 2030
In its recently-released report GBFS Focus 2030, OneStone Consulting has published one of the most comprehensive reports into global GBFS trends available on the market. The objective of the report is to provide accurate information about all aspects of the production and utilisation of granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS), worldwide. It is for those seeking to understand the market dynamics and trends in the steel, cement and concrete sectors, and how this will affect the availability of, and demand for, GBFS on a country by country basis.
The report provides information on the production of blast furnace slag (BFS), GBFS, slag rates, GBFS consumption, imports and exports. The time period is from 2017 to 2021, with outlooks for 2025 and 2030 across 108 countries.
GBFS Focus 2030 shows that the changes starting in Western Europe, while significant in that region, will not filter through to other regions rapidly. As a result, blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steelmaking will continue to be the dominant processing route for the manufacture of steel globally in the period to 2030.
Taking such industry trends into account, the global pig iron production will increase from 1350Mt in 2021 to 1384Mt in 2025 and 1403Mt/yr by 2030. Due to a higher pig iron production and increasing slag rates, the global blast furnace slag (BFS) production will increase from 383Mt in 2021 to 418.8Mt in 2025 and 445.6Mt by 2030.
Another effect is that the granulation rate for BFS will increase from today’s 86.5% (worldwide) to 93.4% by 2030. This will increase global GBFS production from 331.5Mt in 2021 to 381.2Mt in 2025 and to 416.4Mt in 2030.
Consumption and trade trends
Global GBFS consumption declined in 2020 due to the lower cement and construction demand during the Covid-19 pandemic and slightly recovered in 2021. For 2025 and 2030 a significant increase in GBFS consumption is projected, due to higher demand in developing countries and greater availability in those same countries.
Many world regions will become GFBS exporters. Accordingly, there should be enough GBFS available for imports and to substitute fly ash in cement and concrete. There will be plenty in the EU27 too, despite GBFS output here falling by almost 30%. This is the region where the biggest changes in GBFS production will take place in the period to 2030.
GBFS Focus 2030 indicates that there may be additional quantities of GBFS exported from China and India by 2030, as well as from countries in the Far East that are currently building blast furnaces. Japan could go from being a major exporter to a relatively small one. There will be a lot of capacity to export to Australia, the Middle East and Africa. Figure 4 shows GBFS exports and imports from 2017 to 2020, with an estimate for 2021 and forecasts for 2025 and 2030. In the outlook, the imports calculation is to fulfil day-to-day needs, while the exports are derived from the oversupply by countries that produce GBFS.
Other information
This is just scratching at the surface of the GBFS Focus 2030 report. As well as country-by-country forecasts, the report contains plentiful information concerning the development of the steel, cement and concrete sectors, major market trends in each of these industries, producers of GBFS, GBFS trading companies, market shares of slag granulation systems by supplier, market shares for slag grinding mills and an outlook for slag granulation systems and slag mills over the period to 2030.
