What is Coking Coal?

About Coking Coal:

• Metallurgical coal, also known as met and coking coal, is a naturally occurring sedimentary rock found within the earth’s crust.
• It typically contains more carbon, less ash, and less moisture than thermal coal, which is used for electricity generation.
• It is an essential ingredient in the production of steel, making it one of the most widely used building materials on earth. 
• It is a bituminous coal with a suitable quality that allows the production of metallurgical coke, or simply named coke.
  • Coke is the main product of the high-temperature carbonisation of coking coal. 
  • It is an essential input material in steelmaking as it is used to produce pig iron in blast furnaces, acting as the reducing agent of iron ore and as the support of the furnace charge. 
  • It takes around 770 kilograms of coal to make one ton of steel, with approximately 70 percent of global steel produced in basic oxygen blast furnaces.
• The largest producers of coking coal were China (676 million tons in 2022-62%), Australia (169 million tons in 2022-15%), Russia (96 million tons in 2022-9%), USA (55 million tons-5%), and Canada (34 million tons-3%). 

Q1: What is pig iron?

Pig iron is an intermediate product and first product of Iron making reduced from Iron ore. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, typically 3.5–4.5%, along with silica, Manganese, Sulphur, Phosphorus, Titanium and other trace elements. It is obtained directly from the blast furnace and cast in molds.

Source: India’s coking coal imports surge to six-year high