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At the begining more than 12 tons of raw material was necessary to produce 1 ton of steel.
In the 60s still more than 3.5 tons were needed.
I don´t want to go to much into detail.
But for those who are interrested it´s quite an nice topic.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2550858606
I took the balanced stats and adjusted the vanilla steel mill to them.
But that's not the case. The steel mill uses "iron", which comes out of the "iron ore processing plant", not "iron ore" which comes out of the iron mine. I guess it's not clear whether "processing" means smelting, but I would figure so, since it uses 16 MWh power, comparable to 33 MWh of the steel mill.
Well, the "steel" in the game looks like sheets rolled in a cylinder. Apparently that's one of the common forms in which it comes out from the mill.
Can you link to this? I had a lot of trouble finding authoritative information.
Well, apparently what happens is this. X amount of iron gets turned into Y amount of steel. Depending on application, only Z amount of steel is of sufficient quality. The remaining T=Y-Z is effectively scrap steel, and gets fed into the furnace again. So when people calculate yield, they often take Z/X because they are more concerned about how much money it costs to smelt some amount and how much energy it uses. For Z/X, I've found figures ranging from 50% to 90%, with apparently lower yields for construction steel, because I'm guessing the quality requirements are more stringent for it.
But we care more about what's happening to the iron. So I think it's fair to say that most of T will eventually be turned into steel after enough rounds, and the true yield should be closer to T/X. But even Z/X, in the worst case of 50%, is still much higher than the 20% of the game.
If the devs said, "well soviet mills are really crappy, so from 10 tons iron you get 9 tons steel but only 2 tons (!!!) of it is usable", I think that's a bit extreme, but believable. But when you then say, "and the remaining 7 tons just gets thrown away so you need to have a garbage truck come pick it up", that sounds kind of ridiculous. They don't throw it away, it becomes raw materials to make more steel, where it replaces iron. In fact, yields for making steel from scrap steel are much higher, 85-95%. It's one thing if you were extremely wealthy and couldn't bother to recycle. But if you have such low efficiency mills and steel shortages, it's really hard to believe you would just shrug and throw away that much steel.
Actually, why not go into detail? I had trouble finding good stats for even present day. It also seems like there's a huge variety in how exactly people define yield. And of course in the real world there are many different types of steel mill that use different types of iron.
Here's what I found:
https://www.britannica.com/technology/steel/Primary-steelmaking - 1080 kg iron to make 1000 kg steel, 92%. But I think they mean this as an upper limit.
https://www.midrex.com/tech-article/maximizing-iron-unit-yield-from-ore-to-liquid-steel-part-3-melting-practice/ gives an example of 100 kg DR iron to make 97 kg liquid iron, with 3 kg ending up in slag. Note this site also says 85-95% yield for scrap steel.
https://worldsteel.org/wp-content/uploads/Fact-sheet-steel-and-raw-materials.pdf says under "route 1" that 1370 kg iron + 125 kg recycled steel make 1000 kg steel. If we assume perfect recovery for scrap, that is (1000-125)/1370=63%, but of course recycling has some loss so in reality it would be more like 65-70%.
Of course these are modern processes, and the even the best numbers of the 60s were probably more than what the Soviet Union could do. But still, 20% seems really extreme, especially if you're going to make people cart away the other 80% to the landfill.
Moreover, was the Soviet Union known for particularly high quality steel? In theory, they could simply have less stringent QC, accepting more shoddy steel as good enough, which would inflate their apparent yields.
This website[worldsteel.org] claims about 1.6 tons of ore are used for every ton of pig iron (refinement to steel typically only loses only a little), but often scrap metal is also used and it is a modern figure. I have also seen around 1.7 tons of ore per ton of steel in another source, but that was for 1950s USA steel mills. Older refinement processes did lose more iron to slag and other things (some open hearth processes lost 25% of the pig iron), but I am unsure how soviet steel mills compared.
Real life steel mills do seem to get a much better conversion rate, but it is also possible that the developers wanted to balance the output to make up for aspects that were not represented in the game, such as the flux (limestone/dolomite) and slag, which may be abstracted similarly to how citizens' returns to their homes are for public transportation; the slag may just be included in "iron" so that its transportation and disposal is accounted for somewhere instead of being totally ignored, while the limestone/dolomite is simply added onto the iron ore production.
Combining the ore needed along with the slag and flux would bring the ratio closer to 2.335 tons of "stuff" per ton of steel, which would mean 100.4 tons of "iron" (ore + flux + slag). With a lower quality iron ore (say 20% to 25% by weight), the ratio could be pushed to 4.6 tons of "stuff" per ton of steel, which is closer to the current output of the game's steel mill, but it really is all just made up.
Sounds like basically it all works out if we pretend "iron" is actually processed iron ore + flux. They should probably rename it in the waste update :)
Yeah, it's interesting that no flux is needed for steel as well. Given the game makes you even explicitly provide gravel, and in fact there's a decent amount of industry needed to process it, you would expect that flux like limestone would be tracked also. It must have been an oversight from earlier iterations of the game... Hopefully they change it later!
sooo its very normal to see high amount go to as waste during process. ofc this amount in real life situation depends on quality of ore. but % 20 coverage from ore to end item is like heavenly rich vein :>
Today with high quality refinement and technology this can go up to % 62 coverage. so % 20 for that time period seems pretty decent in my opinion.
then issue comes to change of technology while we play the game . all factories should have their processes updated via new technologies and have their production rates incorporate with that. I think that will bring unnecessary complication. Just having some fun with the dealt mechanics which is sort of realistic is suitable enough for gaming purposes.
The steel mill doesn't run with "iron ore" though. It runs with "iron". So it's like melting 5 gram gold and getting back 1 gram gold and 4 gram "trash" - makes little sense.
But it isn't, because the iron is pretty clearly not pig iron, as it looks like rock and is an aggregate, and the blast furnace appears to be a part of the steel mill. "Iron" is likely purified iron oxides, like taconite pellets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconite