BOS Charging

The Basic Oxygen Steelmaking shop at Port Kembla Steelworks is not a place that invites stillness. When a converter receives its charge, molten iron and scrap meet in a vessel designed to handle 200 to 250 tonnes at a time, and the result is exactly what this photograph shows: a cascade of sparks radiating outward in dense arcs, white light at the vessel mouth bright enough to swallow the surrounding structure, and an industrial interior that recedes into darkness beyond the reaction. Basic oxygen steelmaking came to Port Kembla in 1972, introduced alongside the blowing in of No. 5 blast furnace in May of that year. The BOS process was faster and more efficient than the open hearth furnaces that had served the works since 1931, when the first heat of steel was tapped on 8 November. Over the following decade, BOS converters steadily displaced the open hearths. By 1982, after the third BOS vessel was installed, the last open hearth furnaces were closed. A method that had defined steelmaking at Port Kembla for fifty years was gone. The works themselves began with a single blast furnace, blown in on 29 August 1928 by Emily Hoskins, widow of the founder Charles Hoskins, who had died two years earlier before seeing his steelworks completed. That furnace was named Emily. From that one 800 tonne per day furnace, Port Kembla grew into Australia's largest crude steel production plant, with steelmaking exceeding 4,000,000 tonnes per year by 1973 and a workforce that peaked at over 20,000 people. This photograph from 2016 records the BOS converter mid-charge: not a relic, not a ruin, but an active process inside a working steelworks. The sparks and the light are the product of chemistry and physics operating at industrial scale, the same process that has been running at Port Kembla for more than fifty years.