Student Journal - The Southern Queensland Student Chapter at The International Conference on Molten Slags, Fluxes and Salts
From 17th -19th of June I had the opportunity to attend the MOLTEN 2024 conference, hosted by AusIMM in the Southbank convention centre, Brisbane. The conference was highly technical, with most speakers coming from academia rather than the industry. The conference opened with a speech about the significant economic and social benefits that Australia has gained from exporting steelmaking coal as well as iron and aluminium ores overseas.
After this, students attended the “slag fundamentals” and “slag recycling” workshops, where speakers presented on topics related to recent innovations. The researchers in these workshops aimed to address the future challenges of declining quality of iron-bearing raw materials (either from worse ore or from more scrap metal), as well as carbon emission constraints. One of the speakers addressed this with his talk "optimizing slag mixtures" while another discussed using hydrogen both for heating and as part of the chemical steelmaking process. This was all quite high level and complicated.
Luckily, the next speaker did a great job of explaining his presentation "understanding phosphorus in oxygen steelmaking" to an uneducated audience and was able to turn what first seemed a dense topic into an entertaining speech.
Overall, MOLTEN 2024 was an awesome conference, and well set up for the many different niche topics, with multiple different streams of presentations running at the same time. It was also inspiring to see just how many highly skilled people there are all over the world hard at work getting the most value for money from the end products of stuff mined here in Australia.
The keynote speakers did a great job of asserting the importance of producing seemingly ordinary materials like steel and aluminium at higher efficiencies, while emitting less C02 in the process.
This was a great event to attend, and I highly recommend attending MOLTEN to any young professionals in the steelmaking industry.