Viet told a seminar on power consumption and potential power-saving solutions for cement, steel and textile production organized in HCMC last week that due to the generally outdated technology, steel makers in the country consumed more power than their peers in other countries.

Enerteam has conducted a survey on 6 out of 26 steel billet factories nationwide. These six steel mills produce over 1.25 million tons of steel ingots and 959,000 tons of construction steel, equivalent to 35.5% and 18.6% of the national output respectively.

However, the level of power consumption of these steel factories remain high, with an annual energy consumption of over 187,000 tons of  oil equivalent (TOE) and an annual emission of 687,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Talking to the Daily on the sidelines of the seminar, many experts asserted that steel making is one of industries consuming energy and fuel with the lowest efficiency. The main reason is steel industry depends mainly on electric furnace-based production with a low productivity and a high energy consumption.

At present, Vietnam has 65 steel mill projects with an output of over 100,000 tons each. Though they run less than 50% of designed capacity, they consume around 3.5 billion kWh per year.

Compared with other industrialized countries, the rate of power consumption of Vietnam’s steel production is high. In particular, Japan consumes around 350-400 kWh for one ton of finished steel products whilst Vietnam needs up to 700kWh.

Unless specific solutions for cutting production cost by reducing energy consumption are carried out, it is hard for local steel makers to remain globally competitive.

Therefore, the national steel industry is in the need of applying advanced techniques in all processes to curb power consumption, experts said.

The difference in energy use between old-fashioned steel mills and state-of-the-art ones climbs up to 30% at the current time.