The coke plant/blast furnace will remain dominant for the production route from
iron ores to crude steel.There exists a community of fate for the coke plant
and the blast furnace as blast furnaces cannot be operated without coke for physical
reasons. For cost optimization, it was and is important to minimize the coke rate in
the blast furnace and to utilize the by-products of the blast furnace and of the
coking plant. The paper discusses, for an interconnecting network of an integrated
iron and steelworks, the potentials of the use of coke oven gas and blast furnace gas.
The coke oven gas can be utilized for electric power and heat production, for conversion
into hydrogen and methanol as well as reducing gas in the blast furnace or in a DRI plant.
Blast furnace gas can be used conventionally for blast heating, coke plant underfiring
and power production, or it can be recycled to the blast furnace in the nitrogen-free
blast furnace process and in the plasma heated blast furnace process. A critical
comprehensive assessment is also given for these potentials with respect to
CO2 emissions.