Tata Steel on Friday completed 100 years of its blast furnace operations in Jamshedpur. The blast furnace was first blown on December 2, 1911 while steel production commenced on February 16, 1912. The company was established in 1907 as Asia's first integrated private sector steel company.
The Jamshedpur Works of Tata Steel has come a long way to achieving a capacity of 6.8 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) from its initial production capacity of 160,000 tonnes of pig iron, 100,000 tonnes of ingot steel, 70,000 tonnes of rails, beams and shapes and 20,000 tonnes of bars, hoops and rods.
It will take another significant leap to become a 10 mtpa plant in next few months, said Tata Steel in a press release on Friday.
The early days
In the early years, the plant essentially consisted of a battery of 180 non-recovery coke ovens and 30 by-product ovens with a sulphuric acid plant and two blast furnaces, each of 350 tonnes per day capacity, and a 300-tonne hot metal mixer, four open hearth furnaces of 50-tonne capacity each, one steam engine driven 40-inch reversing blooming mill, one 28-inch reversing combination rail and structural mill with reheating furnaces and one 16-inch and two 10-inch rolling mills.
In the early days, about 6,300 people were engaged daily at the Works by the company and its contractors. Today, as a Fortune 500 company, the Group employs over 81,000 people across five continents.
Tata Steel Group is amongst the leading steel manufacturers in the world with an annual crude steel capacity of over 28 mtpa with operations in 26 countries and a commercial presence in over 50 countries. The Tata Steel Group registered a turnover of $27 billion in FY '11.