To Yancheng administrative service center

There are three main processes for extracting nickel from laterite nickel ore: hydrometallurgy (electrolysis), pyrometallurgy (electric furnace) and pyrometallurgy (high furnace)< At present, China's new instrial projects have implemented the one vote veto system for environmental protection evaluation. Therefore, the comparison between environmental protection and circular economy is carried out firstly: whether it is electric furnace or blast furnace, the solid slag proced in proction has been calcined at high temperature and becomes low strength cement after drying and grinding, which is the best filler for cement manufacturers to proce standard cement, It is also a high-quality raw material for brick and tile factory, which can be recycled 100%; In addition, the cooling water used in blast furnace proction can be recycled by building a closed cooling pool; Blast furnace slag flushing water can also be recycled after sedimentation. Therefore, almost all solid and liquid wastes proced by pyrometallurgy are recycled, and the second waste is completely solved among the three wastes. Therefore, it is the development direction of nickel metal refining instry in China. However, no matter it is electric furnace or blast furnace, there is no complete solution to the CO2 emission in proction, and there is no international report to solve this problem. As the sulfur content of laterite nickel ore is lower than that of ordinary iron ore, the SO2 emission in proction is greatly reced compared with that of ordinary pig iron smelting, but the recovery and utilization of gas and st are the key points in Pyrometallurgical smelting. The electric furnace occupies a small area and is easy to handle; Blast furnace is relatively large in engineering and investment. It is urgent for us to speed up the research and development of a complete set of equipment, standards and processes for ferronickel smelting in line with the needs of environmental protection and circular economy
electric furnace smelting
mainly uses electricity as the main energy. It is generally believed that electric energy is clean and convenient, and no CO2 is emitted ring smelting, which is in line with environmental protection. We should understand that if nuclear power, wind power and solar power are used, this view is certainly good. But the fact is that most of the electric furnace smelting in our country uses coal electricity, and a large amount of CO2 and waste gas are generated in the process of power generation. Coal combustion turns water into high temperature and high pressure steam through the boiler. The gas energy drives the gas turbine to rotate to form mechanical energy, and the mechanical energy of steam turbine drives the generator to rotate to form electrical energy. Every time the form of energy is converted, the efficiency is reced; In addition to the loss of long-distance transmission of electric energy, the heat generated by each degree of electricity consumed when electric energy reaches the user's electric furnace is far lower than that generated by putting the coal directly into the blast furnace. Because the Coke put into the blast furnace is directly burned without energy conversion and has high efficiency. Compared with blast furnace, electric energy and electric furnace smelting must reach the same temperature to proce hot metal. Therefore, the amount of electric coal converted from electric energy and electric furnace smelting power consumption will be higher than that of coke used in blast furnace. In a word, the total amount of CO2 emitted from electric energy through electric furnace smelting will exceed that of high furnace smelting. Secondly, coke is used as energy in blast furnace smelting, and several hundred kinds of chemical raw materials can be extracted from coal in the process of converting coal into coke, which is recognized as the most economical and effective way of comprehensive utilization of coal resources. Finally, power proction investment is large, coke proction investment is small. Therefore, the proction of ferronickel by blast furnace is better than that by electric furnace in energy consumption and environmental protection< According to the comparison of proct quality, price and market demand of different processes, hydrometallurgy can extract 99.9% nickel and cobalt respectively, which is the biggest advantage of hydrometallurgy. Pure nickel is the main raw material of electroplating, battery, chemical catalytic equipment and special stainless steel; Pure cobalt is the main raw material of special steel with high strength, high temperature and high wear resistance
hydrometallurgy has a long history in China, accounting for a high proportion of nickel output in China. However, the annual output of pure nickel has far exceeded the annual market demand for the above purposes. Therefore, most of them are now used in smelting 300 series nickel stainless steel. This is really anti-aircraft bombardment of mosquitoes, there is a suspicion of overkill. Due to the large investment, long cycle, complex process, high cost and high price of hydrometallurgy proction process, stainless steel and special steel manufacturers love and hate it. Aiqi has high purity, easy to use and guaranteed proct quality; If the price is too high, the proct cost will rise, the profit will decrease, and the market competitiveness will be reced. However, this kind of situation is difficult to change
electric furnace process of pyrometallurgy:
ferronickel containing 10-25% nickel and a small amount of cobalt and chromium can be refined, which can replace pure nickel as nickel raw material for smelting 300 series stainless steel. Because it uses electricity as the main heat energy (it generally consumes 7000 ~ 8000 kwh to proce a ton of ferronickel), it does not use coke as the heat source of blast furnace, but also brings the phosphorus in coke into the proct. Therefore, the phosphorus content of ferronickel proced by electric furnace should be lower than that of blast furnace, which is beneficial to shorten the smelting time of stainless steel, so it is widely welcomed by the market. However, the weakness in the United States is that China's power supply continues to be tight, China's high power consumption instry is strictly controlled, and once the proction enterprises are in a tight area of power consumption, the first thing to bear the brunt is to cut off the power of large electric furnaces, which makes the proction abnormal. Secondly, the output of ferronickel proced by electric furnace is relatively low. A single 25000 KW electric furnace proces about 25000 tons of ferronickel with 14% nickel per year, which is far from meeting the large demand for nickel in the blowout development of China's stainless steel instry in recent years; Finally, it should be pointed out that smelting ferronickel with nickel content of 15-25% or even higher in EAF is not realized by increasing the nickel content of nickel ore, but by recing the rection of iron in nickel ore. such a large amount of unreced iron oxide is discharged as slag (sometimes the iron content in slag is as high as 20%), The slag is then transported to a cement plant to make cement or a brick factory to make bricks. Considering that the market price of imported iron ore with 65% iron content has reached several hundred yuan per ton, it is a great waste of resources to make cement or bricks with a large amount of iron slag
the selling price of ferronickel proced by EAF process is based on the nickel content, and a certain discount is given on the basis of the market price of pure nickel. The remaining iron, cobalt and chromium are not priced. Compared with pure nickel smelting, the cost of smelting 300 series stainless steel can be reced by 3000-4000 yuan per ton
pyrometallurgical blast furnace process:
ferronickel containing 1.5-10% nickel and a small amount of iron and chromium can be smelted, which can become the basic raw material for smelting nickel containing stainless steel. Due to the high ore price and sea freight and the fact that the sale of ferronickel is only based on the nickel content, unless the customer specially requests and increases the price, the ferronickel containing less than 4% nickel is rarely smelted by manufacturers, and the most popular one in the market is ferronickel containing 10% nickel and phosphorus ≤ 0.035%, Stainless steel manufacturers only need to add a certain amount of ferrochrome to smelt 300 series procts (for ferronickel with less than 10% nickel content to smelt 300 series stainless steel, a certain amount of pure nickel or high nickel ferronickel proced by electric furnace should be added for adjustment). At present, there are not many blast furnaces that can proce the above components e to technology, ore composition and other reasons. The biggest characteristic of smelting ferronickel in blast furnace is high output. The annual output of a 208m3 blast furnace can reach more than 40000 tons. Due to the need to add ferrochrome and high nickel iron, six such blast furnaces can meet the basic nickel and iron demand of a 304 stainless steel plant with an annual output of 300000 tons
dephosphorization in stainless steel smelting is the most difficult, and it is the key to control the phosphorus content of ferronickel below 0.035%. At present, our company has basically controlled the dephosphorization technology in blast furnace. Our procts are even higher in nickel and lower in phosphorus than those of some electric furnace smelters. Due to the high output, the nickel content is generally lower than that of electric furnace smelting. The sales pricing method is the same as that of electric furnace Ferronickel, but the discount coefficient is larger, and each nickel is slightly lower than the price of electric furnace nickel. To sum up, taking blast furnace ferronickel as basic raw material and electric furnace ferronickel as regulating raw material is the best combination with the lowest cost and the most guaranteed supply of 300 series stainless steel raw material, which is the direction of future development
blast furnace can proce pig iron as well as ferronickel. Although there is a word difference between ferronickel and pig iron, they belong to two instries: Ferroalloy and ordinary iron. There are considerable differences in ore composition, formula and smelting process. It is absolutely wrong to apply the concept of pig iron smelting to ferronickel smelting mechanically< There are great differences in metal content between ferronickel and pig iron ore: for smelting pig iron in blast furnace, if 65% iron ore is imported, one ton of iron will proce several hundred kilograms of slag; For example, smelting ferronickel containing 7% nickel generally requires 5 tons of dry ore containing 1.5% nickel and 20% iron, about 7.7 tons of wet ore, and about 21.5% of total metal content of ore. therefore, 1 ton of ferronickel can proce 4 tons of slag, which is almost ten times of that of pig iron smelting. The time of slag opening and slag tapping and the times of slag tapping are obviously increased, and the process must be greatly adjusted
at present, pig iron smelting is popular. Large blast furnace is an advanced proctive force, which is in line with environmental protection. Small blast furnace is a backward proctive force and a major polluter, which must be eliminated. In fact, it is a big misunderstanding to apply this viewpoint to ferronickel smelting mechanically. As the slag from ferronickel smelting is many times that of pig iron smelting, it is not suitable for large blast furnace to convert to ferronickel smelting, because the slag output is too large and the opening time of slag outlet is too long, which affects the furnace temperature and the smooth operation of proction. Compared with the daily iron tapping tons per cubic meter of blast furnace capacity, the iron tapping coefficient of 100 ~ 200 cubic meters of small blast furnace is 3.4, that is, the daily iron proction per cubic meter is 3.4 tons. If the furnace type, burden and technology are well coordinated, this coefficient can be exceeded. On the contrary, the tapping coefficient of several thousand cubic meters of blast furnace which has been put into operation in recent years is only around 2. What is the reason
the original blast furnace size is measured by the furnace capacity, which is a three-dimensional space of length, width and height, and is measured by the third power of length unit meter. However, after the sinter and coke are added to the top of the blast furnace, the temperature graally decreases and burns, and the temperature graally rises until the temperature of a certain height level reaches the level of iron oxide in the ore. under this temperature environment, the iron oxide in the ore is reced and flows out, That is, the main iron proction is mainly determined by the size of the layer area, and the layer area is measured by the second power of the length unit meter. After the number of meters is greater than 1, the second power of meters is always less than the third power of meters. Therefore, the big blast furnace must be better than the small blast furnace, but on the contrary, although the environmental protection equipment on the big blast furnace is more economical and the labor cost sharing is relatively low, if the big blast furnace is not equipped with energy-saving and environmental protection equipment, it is also a big polluter
at present, domestic ferronickel smelting blast furnaces are generally transformed from ironmaking blast furnaces, the maximum furnace capacity is not more than 400m3, and the proction is still normal. However, we have found that the larger the furnace capacity is, the more difficult the proction is, and the less ferronickel is proced per unit volume per day. Practice is the only standard to test truth. The scientific outlook on development must first be established on the basis of scientific objective investigation and Research on the basis of practice, so as to ensure that new policies can be formulated on the basis of seeking truth from facts. Therefore, as far as the specific project of smelting ferronickel with blast furnace is concerned, it is a typical anti scientific behavior to say that the large blast furnace must be better than the small blast furnace, or even to say that the new ferronickel blast furnace must reach the standard of more than 1000m3 without investigation and research, and it has caused very serious consequences. For example: the procts proced by our company are transported to several major stainless steel plants in China with cold nickel iron blocks for smelting 300 series stainless steel. One of the stainless steel smelters was about to be put into operation last year because of a new blast furnace with several thousand cubic meters, and the original two blast furnaces with more than 700 cubic meters each will be shut down. We hope our company will change them to Ferronickel, and we agree
it is estimated that these two blast furnaces, which fully meet the national ferroalloy proction standards, can proce about 250000 tons of hot metal nickel containing about 7% nickel per year, which can be directly imported into the plant

The main types of nickel ore in China are copper nickel sulfide ore and laterite nickel ore. China's laterite nickel ore is mainly imported from the Philippines. Since 1970, Japan and the Philippines began to cooperate and set up a joint venture mining company to mine high-grade nickel ore containing more than 2% nickel, which was transported back to Nippon Steel and Sumitomo company for smelting. As a result, the high-grade nickel ore in the Philippines was monopolized by Japanese enterprises, while China can only import low-grade nickel ore with nickel content of 0.9% ~ 1.1%
there are 11.25 million tons of nickel ore reserves in China's neighboring countries, only distributed in a few countries, including Russia (6.6 million tons), Indonesia (3.2 million tons), Philippines (410000 tons), Myanmar (920000 tons) and Vietnam (120000 tons), but accounting for a large proportion of the world's total reserves, accounting for about 23%. Laterite nickel deposits are mainly distributed in Indonesia, Philippines and Myanmar. The nickel resources in Indonesia are mainly laterite nickel deposits in the weathering crust of basic and ultrabasic rocks, which are distributed in the eastern part of the archipelago. The ore belt can be traced from central Sulawesi to halmahla, Obi, waigao archipelago, and tanamela area of niaotou Peninsula in ilianchaya, Therefore, the lateritic nickel cobalt deposit has a good prospecting prospect. The Philippines is also dominated by laterite nickel, which is mainly distributed in noork island. There are also lateritic nickel silicates in Myanmar, which are controlled by the ultrabasic rock belt of the Indo Myanmar mountains and distributed in the western margin of the central basin. The nickel resources in Russia are distributed in the Norilsk copper nickel sulfide deposit on the northwest edge of Siberian Platform. The nickel deposits in Vietnam are of copper nickel sulfide type, which are distributed in the northwest of China. The Banfu deposit in ShanLuo province is known to occur in the tabu ophiolite belt of the heishuihe Rift Valley, with a proven reserve of 120000 tons