4. Variants of the classic blast furnace

Without going into too much detail, we should point out that alongside the "classic blast furnaces", i.e. large, extremely efficient, coke-fired units, we find the following blast furnaces.

• Firstly, small, more or less conventional blast furnaces which, as we saw above (see Introduction), appear in the statistics in the form of charcoal blast furnaces, producing a total of around 8 Mt of cast iron per year worldwide, but mainly in Brazil. This method of producing cast iron seemed to be stagnating, but recently, with the sharp rises in the prices of coke and primary metals (cast iron, DRI/HBI and scrap, see