2. Changes in manufacturing processes

Since the 1990s, there has been a certain systematic organization of liquid steel production techniques, with two main upstream channels:

• the cast iron process with a blast furnace fed with agglomerated iron ore, oxygen steelmaking, ladle treatment and increasingly with vacuum treatment, continuous slab casting, strip mill or quarto mill; this process is practically reserved for flat products in Europe;

• the electrical sector, supplied with scrap with an UHP (ultra-high-power) furnace, ladle treatment and continuous casting of blooms or billets, followed by long-product trains: bars, beams, sections, wire rod.

Some plants are based on electric furnaces, thin slab casting and continuous finishing trains for thin plates. The cast-iron die is used for top-quality long products: hard wire...