April Cornish Mining Sundowner: sad news of the death of a popular CSM lecturer and thoughts on British Steel

There was a good attendance, of around 20, at last night's Cornish Mining Sundowner at Falmouth's Chain Locker, with many local companies being represented. Luckily a window in the weather made this the first outdoor sundowner of the year.

Although many of the "regulars" were missing there were a number of new faces, including Shokirjon Sunnatulloev, from Uzbekistan, who has completed his MSc in Mineral Processing at Camborne School of Mines, with Prof. Hylke Glass, Head of Mineral Processing.  Shokirjon will soon be taking up a lecturing post at the Navoi State University of Mining and Technologies in Uzbekistan.

Shokirjon and Hylke

There was sad news of Dr. Noel Kantaris, who died last week aged 89. He was a lecturer at Camborne School of Mines from 1973-1997, where between 1978 and 1997 he was the CSM IT Manager. Noel enjoyed his retirement in Cornwall and made many overseas trips including an annual visit to his homeland of Greece and it was a pleasure for me to accompany him on the 1978 industrial tour of Greece with final year CSM students.

Noel Kantaris, and with CSM students at a taverna in Epidaurus, Greece, in 1978

I was pleased to see Phil and Joan Oliver at the sundowner. Phil was a mining lecturer at CSM and a great friend of Noel. Between 1989 and 2010 Noel and Phil produced over 90 computer software books on such subjects as the Internet, Google, various versions of Windows and other operating systems applications eg Paint Shop Pro, Word, Excel, Access and Works and programming languages Linux, C and Visual Basic.

They had a strict working agreement. They each wrote the books independently but all the books produced during that time were co-authored. which  meant they produced two to three books per year. The Lennon-McCartney of computing! The books filled a gap in the market in the days that personal computers became the norm but not many people had access to the very new Internet and World Wide Web, and before Google searching became so useful. 

Joan and Phil Oliver with Barbara and me

Dominant in the UK minerals industry news this week is that of the UK's two remaining iron blast furnaces at the British Steel site in Scunthorpe. The Scunthorpe steelworks is owned by the Jingye Group, a private Chinese steel manufacturer headquartered in Beijing and the steelworks is currently the sole producer of virgin steel in the UK. However, its future is uncertain due to financial losses and operational challenges. The UK government has temporarily taken control of the site to prevent potential closure, which could jeopardize approximately 2,700 jobs. This action was prompted by Jingye's cessation of essential raw material orders, which risked the permanent closure of the blast furnaces, which once allowed to cool are extremely difficult to bring back to operation.

The primary ingredients to the blast furnaces are iron ore, limestone and coke. Iron ore is imported mainly from Brazil and Australia, and coking coal from USA, Canada and Australia. The UK has faced disruptions in securing coking coal due to geopolitical tensions and the government has committed to phasing out coal use, including banning new coal mining licenses. While this policy aims to reduce carbon emissions, it also limits the development of domestic coking coal sources. The approval of the Woodhouse Colliery, near Whitehaven in Cumbria, the first new deep coal mine in the UK in 30 years, has faced environmental opposition (posting of 14 January 2021) and is not yet operational despite this being a source of metallurgical coal for steel making, and not for use in power generation. My posting of 23rd September 2024 (Was scrapping the proposed coal mine in Cumbria the right decision?) now seems more relevant!

It always amazes me how the media get things wrong when reporting on technology. This is an extract from The Times of four days ago:

"The prime minister's recall of parliament to give the business secretary the power to do everything possible to stop the closure of the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe and to subsidise the cost of coking coal to fuel them completely misses the point and compounds an error. The traditional method of making steel in a blast furnace was invented by Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856 but is no longer economically or ecologically viable."

The blast furnace does not produce steel, it produces pig-iron, a crude iron product with a high carbon content (3.5-4.5% C). It is brittle and not directly useful for most applications. The molten pig iron is mainly refined in the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) where a blast of pure oxygen is blown into the molten pig iron to oxidise the carbon and other impurities to produce steel with a much lower carbon content (around 0.2% for mild steel).

The BOF is the modern form of the Bessemer process, and uses pure oxygen, rather than air as in the Bessemer Converter. The Bessemer process had poor control on quality, particularly on removing phosphorous and sulphur, and it was essentially obsolete by the 20th century. But Sir Henry Bessemer invented this revolutionary method of refining pig iron in 1856 - he did not invent the blast furnace, which originated in China around the 5th century BC, and later spread to Europe.