Fellowship programme

Economics Fellowship 2022 | ASEAN Study

As China’s strong growth phase ends, we expect India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to be the regions showing the most robust growth in steel demand in the coming decades. The ASEAN has strong potential for steel demand growth, derived from its young and competitive labour force, geographic location, openness to trade, ability to implement reforms, and favourable investment climate. Indeed, steel demand in the ASEAN consistently outperformed the world average by growing at an average rate of 5% in the past four decades.

However, the region is comprised of highly diverse countries with different stages of development and growth potential. Therefore, we need to examine each country’s steel-using sectors’ growth potential in order to evaluate the whole region’s steel demand potential. Further, the region’s supply side has, in recent years, seen rapid development. There is a need to understand the resulting implications for the region’s steel industry landscape, raw materials availability, and sustainability.

Three fellows from Baowu Group, China Steel Corporation and Tata Steel have worked hard to present a complete and comprehensive picture of the ASEAN economy and the steel industry development, addressing the following questions:

• What are the key features of the ASEAN economy?
• What is the status and potential for steel-using sectors in the ASEAN countries?
• Which ASEAN countries have the strongest potential for steel demand growth?
• How is the supply side landscape in ASEAN evolving?
• Will the growth be sustained in the long run?

Technology Fellowship 2020 | Intelligent Manufacturing

The “4th industrial revolution” (as a generally accepted term) presents a lot of opportunities. Presently there are numerous initiatives at both national and regional levels to boost the competitiveness of manufacturing around the world. Steel is one prime example of an industry which can greatly benefit from the digital revolution in not only the production of higher quality products but resource efficiency and higher environmental performance. There are increasing number of digital transformation programs being initiated.

However, the level of readiness and knowledge varies significantly within the steel industry. The Intelligent Manufacturing Fellowship sponsored by HBIS Group intends to lay the foundations for worldsteel members to find a strong position in a future which is dominated by the digital revolution.

The worldsteel Technology Committee (TECO) has identified the need for the steel industry to have a common specification/taxonomy for digitalization in the steel industry. The Intelligent manufacturing project covers key concerns for the industry to share best practices in information safeguarding. In summary, the project aims at ensuring that the digitalization projects in the steel industry are ‘future-proof’ where the total cost of ownership from implementation to managing and upgrading processes are lower through:

• Industry specification (common terminology)
• Information security
• Future-proofing

Safety and Health Fellowship 2020 | Understanding Safety Culture

The development and maintenance of a positive Safety culture is frequently identified as critical to safe production and zero harm. What should be done to develop a positive safety culture is generally well understood, however, guidance on how this guidance can be implemented and the results assessed is lacking.

This Fellowship sponsored by Severstal focussed on the development of an assessment methodology to allow safety culture to be assessed within the global steel industry. The key deliverable of the project will be a report answering the following questions:

• What is safety culture, what is the link between safety culture and safety performance?
•  How can Safety Culture be assessed?  What methodologies are used in steel and other sectors?
• What methodology to assess safety culture is recommended for use in the steel industry?

Safety and Health Fellowship 2019 | Process Safety Management

Over the last decade, Process Safety Management (PSM) has been the leading cause of serious injuries within the steel sector. PSM is a blend of engineering, operations and management skills focused on preventing catastrophic accidents, particularly structural collapse, explosions, fires and toxic releases associated with loss of containment of energy or dangerous substances such as toxic gases, molten metal, chemicals and petroleum products.

worldsteel’s PSM project Fellow sponsored by Ternium, researched best practice in Process Safety Management, leading to the subsequent development and dissemination of a set of steel industry Process Safety Fundamentals. The fundamentals were then presented at a comprehensive workshop, which facilitated an exchange of leading Process Safety practices among steelmakers, and exchanges between steelmakers and members of the academic research community.

Then next phase of the project focused on the use of the bow-tie methodology to record critical threat, hazards and consequences in high hazard facilities across the steel manufacturing process. Long term benefits include the establishment of a number of expert groups, working with industry expert practitioners to continuously pool knowledge.

Safety and Health Fellowship 2019 | Safety performance and leading practice adoption

Nothing is more important than the safety and health of the people who work in the iron and steel industry. This Fellowship sponsored by HBIS Group looked at safety performance and leading practices within the industry. A comprehensive survey of worldsteel’s membership was undertaken, focused on safety performance, critical risks and the adoption of leading practices.

The results were analysed and a comprehensive report was prepared and presented to worldsteel’s Safety and Health Committee as well as a given webinar to worldsteel’s broader membership. The documents are housed on the worldsteel extranet, available to all members. worldsteel also make this best practice compendium available to the wider industrial safety community when requested.

Sustainability Fellowship 2018 | Steel and competitive materials

Steel needs to position itself as an economically competitive and environmentally sustainable material to retain its market share in a number of important sectors.

This wide-ranging market research Fellowship sponsored by Severstal collected information on the marketing strategies of the aluminium, cement and timber industries, identifying their strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis steel. It also collected information on the marketing strategies of worldsteel members and proposed potential areas of alignment, focusing on a life cycle perspective.

The result is an expanding library of case studies allowing steel companies to easily factor in the marketing strategies of competitor industries in their overall business strategies.

Market Development Fellowship 2018 | Railways sector

The first test of the ultra-fast Hyperloop train (1200 km/h) in May 2016 indicated that a radical revolution would soon be introduced into the world’s railway system. The revolution would raise a number of new challenging requirements on materials, including steel. Two fellowships sponsored by Evraz and Masteel Group were carried out to examine the implications of the new requirements so that the steel industry could be well prepared to address the challenges and capture the opportunities ahead.

The increasing competition from competing materials and the evolving mode of mobility around the world will have unprecedented impact on the demand for, and role of, steel. At the time of the Fellowship (2018) no similar scientific study existed in the world looking at the future of transport systems from a material industry point of view. worldsteel was able to source research specialists from its membership to carry out this important project leading to a comprehensive database which supports steelmakers to reposition their strategies in the railway segment.

Life Cycle Assessment Fellowship 2016 | ISO standard

To demonstrate the environmental performance and benefits of steel, it is necessary to take a full life cycle perspective, from raw material manufacture, steel production, use of a product and the final recycling or disposal of a product. Assessing a product in this way needs to be done on a consistent and sound basis.

A Fellowship sponsored by Tata Steel (Europe and India) was set up to participate in the development of an associated (ISO) standard on life cycle inventory calculation for steel products, ensuring a harmonised approach and consensus was achieved. In addition, analysis was carried out to determine the life cycle impact of steel production, analysing the impact of upstream data for use by the steel industry in its LCI assessments. The result is a database of life cycle inventory data that can be used by all external parties as well as a tool for the steel industry to understand where the impacts of making steel arise, from cradle to gate and considering multiple impact assessments.