Indian iron ore future - The next decade

The iron minerals including magnetite, hematite and goethite market has emerged significantly across the world. The large magnetite deposits of around 3 billion tones which are available in Western Ghats cannot be considered for exploitation by the traditional opencast mining method since the environmental issues cannot be mitigated by adopting opencast mining. Global steel production grew rapidly between 2003-2008 at a CAGR of 6.6% due to the strong demand from China and other countries. It has been expected that steel production may continue to drop in the year 2010 also and may stabilize only after 2011 onwards when world wide economic recovery may stabilize. It is required to examine the steel making process routes for arriving at proper conclusion with regard to requirement of iron ore raw material. The route of blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF), is producing around 65% of the total crude steel, while 35% of the total production is obtained through EAF and other routes which utilize scrap and other metallics such as DRI and HBI.