Iron and Steel Production

The blast furnace (No. 1) was commissioned in 1928. Based on an American design it was 47.5 metres high with a rate capacity of 800 tonnes/day and was perhaps the largest in the British Empire at that time. Its introduction also forced the closure of the two smaller furnaces at Lithgow.

The depression years followed, with a major reduction in demand, and processing was now complicated by a production schedule that required the blast furnace iron being sent from Port Kembla to Lithgow for processing to steel. The new open hearth (No. 1) shop at Port Kembla was not commissioned until the end of 1931 at which time the last of the rolling mills at Lithgow was closed. A 685 mm mill and later a 915 mm mill had by this time been installed at Port Kembla and finally the 250 mm mill from Lithgow was resited at Port Kembla.

It was a time of acute business difficulty; in 1929 pig iron was selling for $13 a tonne in Australia against the UK domestic price of $7 and Australian wages were also much higher than UK and Europe wages. A devaluation of the Australian currency helped to keep the steel works viable for a period, but the Company had been too under-capitalized from the start to survive and BHP acquired control in 1935. At this time the plant consisted of a blast furnace, three open-hearth furnaces, a bloom mill, and rail and structural mill, a merchant bar mill and a spun pipe plant together with a colliery, eighty coke ovens, and limestone and cement works. With the acquisition, a contract for the supply of iron ore to Port Kembla by BHP was cancelled and one introduced along the lines of contracts under which Newcastle works operated.

Early in 1937, a second blast furnace installation was begun and this was blown-in in 1938; steel making furnaces were increased in number to five by early 1939 and a continuous billet mill came into operation towards the end of the same year. At the outbreak of the Second World War the annual capacity was around 600,000 tonnes. During the war, a sixth open hearth furnace was constructed, with a seventh commissioned in 1943. An electric steel plant had been completed three years previously.

During the war, along with most other industries, the works diversified into items of military hardware, producing gun barrels on a substantial scale. It was in the immediate post-war period, however, that the important expansion decisions were made, decisions that were to result in the Port Kembla steelworks becoming, finally, the largest industrial plant in the country. The major decision was to produce flat rolled products at Port Kembla which, then, became the site for Australia's first hot strip mill, opened in 1955 by Prime Minister Menzies. An additional requirement for flat rolled strip production was an upgrading of the bloom mill which would be required to roll twelve tonne ingots into slabs as feed for the hot strip mill. A third blast furnace was commenced.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering