PERSPECTIVES OF THE WORLD STEEL AND COKE MARKETS (on the materials of the international conference "EuroCoke Summit", Amsterdam, 2021)

The article is devoted to the review of the main materials of the international conference Eurocoke-2021, which took place on October 5-6 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Despite the fact that the conference is named as European, the representatives of the world's leading firms and research centers from the EU, England, Australia, India, USA, China, Ukraine and other countries took part in its work. The article summarizes the main results and conclusions of the reports and discussions. As the most of speakers noted, that despite the impact of the global recession and the logistical difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the China's ban to use Australian coal, a significant change in the global coal market is not expected in the near future. China's trade policy has led mainly to a redistribution of markets for Australian, American, Canadian and Russian coal. Technologies and researches to replace some of the components of the coking coal charge with a cheaper coal grades or carbonaceous materials of plant origin in order to reduce the cost of coke and steel are still relevant. The strict requirements for limiting greenhouse gas emissions are forcing coke and steel producers to modernize the existing traditional production facilities (including using integrated technologies) to reduce emissions and improve the efficiency of the CO2 capturing and utilization. In the world steel production in the next decade, a significant increase in the share of technologies focused on abandoning coke and blast furnace production is hardly possible due to the high cost and duration of the corresponding projects. Keywords: coke production, steel industry, world coking coal market, steel market, trends, recession, logistics, COVID-19, greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonization, direct iron reduction, integrated technologies, stamped charge coking, biomass, catalysis. Corresponding author E.T. Kovalev, e-mail: post@ukhin.org.ua