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Energy: Role of energy costs in basic materials
  • Cement: the technology is simple - we take almost any raw material, from limestone and clay to slag, which is nearby and cheap, we burn it into cement clinker. These are rotary kilns - for a 140-150m long kiln, the gas consumption is frantic, the temperature in the firing zone is kept up to 1700. The drives on the kiln are motors over 150kW. Plus transporters. Then grinding in ball tube mills is a huge consumption of EE. Well, there is also aspiration, filters, etc. Conclusion - raw materials cost a penny, 80 percent of the cost of cement - energy.

    Glass: Stove-pool, we pour sand into it (mined, washed, classified, dried) plus soda (soda production is a separate song, there are shaft furnaces 40-80 meters high, the main costs are gas and EE) - EE and gas. Continuously melting raw materials and forming a bottle or pulling a sheet. Conclusion - raw materials cost a penny, 80 percent of the cost of both soda and glass itself are energy carriers.

    Brick. Ceramics - clay, knead, knead again, and again knead, then mold, dry in huge dryers - it dried 10 times more than the oven. The energy carrier in the dryer is gas or electricity. There are combined ones. Dry for a long time. We take it out, then we burn it in a slot-hole tunnel kiln. Temperature - 950-1100. The heat carrier is gas. Conclusion - raw materials cost a penny, 80 percent of the cost of ceramic bricks - energy. Usually it is automatic plant - personnel costs a penny.

    Silicate brick, gas silicate, foam concrete. Sand plus liquid glass (sodium silicate or potassium silicate, boiled into a liquid by steam, steam generators - EE) - mixed, molded, loaded into steaming chambers. Steam steaming - EE or gas. Gas silicate is a little different, but the general conclusion is that raw materials cost a penny, 80 percent of the cost are energy carriers.

    Ferrous metallurgy. Cast iron - ore is mined, enrichment - washing, roasting requires lot of EE and gas. If a blast furnace, then coal plus gas plus petcoke, well, there are a lot of things and a huge amount of energy efficiency. If the convector is a jet of oxygen from above into the pot - EE plus gas. From cast iron to steel - or immediately after the convector, after a couple of warm-ups or, more often, chipboard - we melt cast iron plus scrap metal with coal and electric arc additives. Energy consumption is huge. What we pour into chipboard - ferroalloys (75-80% of EE in the cost price), carburizer, metal mirror heaters, etc. Conclusion - raw materials cost a penny, 60-65 percent of the cost of ferrous metal - energy. If we roll it into a product - heating, rolling - EE and gas.

    Non-ferrous metallurgy, except for aluminum, is practically the same as ferrous metallurgy, only there are a lot more redistributions for the preparation of raw materials, the percentage of energy carriers in the cost is slightly less.

    Aluminum - ore is mined, driven at the GOK to the state of electrocorundum, that is, electromelting and grinding to obtain a powder - electricity is practically the only consumable material. We load it into an electrolyzer (melt bath) and melt it with electricity, remove the alloy, roll it, stamp it. For aluminum - the main cost is from electricity consumption. I completely forgot - when melting, we add pure crystalline silicon, in which 85% of the cost is electricity cost.

    All of the above furnaces (rotators, tunnels, glass melting baths, mines, blast furnaces, chipboard, electrolyzers, etc.) need a refractory lining. Refractories - magnesite, corundum, silicon carbide, fireclay, zirconium, diatomite, dinas, etc. - are all fired or melted in electric or gas furnaces. The consumption of energy for different refractories is different, but very large.

    Chemistry - furnaces everywhere, fertilizers - furnaces and distillation, food industry - furnaces everywhere, sugar, by the way. Asphalt - well, yes, bitumen, crushed stone and sand.

    The general conclusion is that every butt truck, glass bottle or beer can, candy or concrete step has a wild amount of Electricity and Gas invested in it! Just wild. Any change in the price at the initial stage entails the accumulated rise in price and the complete non-competitiveness of the goods.