BOS Building Facing West

Two torpedo-shaped slag pots sit on the concrete floor of the BOS furnace bay at Port Kembla Steelworks, one pulled aside for ground-level repair work. A large curved extraction duct sweeps through the left foreground and column E11 anchors the right of the frame. At the far end an open bay lets a strip of exterior light into the building, which stands roughly 80 metres high. Concrete and steel. No ornamentation. The building is sized to the work: large-scale steelmaking in 200/250 tonne vessels, at a pace and volume the open hearth furnaces that preceded it could not sustain. Basic oxygen steelmaking arrived at Port Kembla in 1972, the same year No. 5 blast furnace was blown in and briefly held the world production record for a single blast furnace. The BOS process accelerated steelmaking significantly compared with the open hearth method, and through the 1970s, additional BOS capacity was added. By 1982, after the third BOS vessel was installed, the last of the open hearth furnaces closed. They had been running since the first heat was tapped on 8 November 1931. Port Kembla Steelworks was established by Hoskins Iron and Steel Co. Ltd, with construction commencing in 1926. The No. 1 blast furnace was blown in on 29 August 1928 by Emily Hoskins, widow of the company's founder Charles Hoskins, who had died in February 1926 before his steelworks was finished. The furnace carried her name. Australian Iron and Steel Ltd was formed the same year with English and Welsh partners, and the site passed to BHP as a subsidiary in 1935, then to BlueScope Steel Ltd in 2002. At its peak in 1973, the steelworks produced more than 4,000,000 tonnes of steel per year and employed more than 20,000 people. The BOS Building is a permanent part of that record: the structure where the shift from open hearth to oxygen steelmaking was made physical. This photograph, made in 2016, was taken inside an active steelworks that has been producing steel since 1931. The image is part of the BlueScope Port Kembla series.