Bhubaneswar: Tata Steel Friday commissioned country’s largest blast furnace at its Kalinganagar plant, which will help increase the production capacity to 8 million tonne per annum from 3 million tonne per annum,

Tata announced on Friday, September 20 that the company had successfully commissioned India’s largest blast furnace at Kalinganagar in Odisha.

The blast furnace at the Whyalla steelworks is not producing steel for the second time this year, with the Sanjeev Gupta-led GFG Alliance unable to say how long it will be until normal operations resume.

With the Phase II expansion, Odisha has emerged as the largest investment destination in India for Tata Steel, with a total cumulated investment of over Rs 100,000 crore in the last 10 years.

The company commenced the Rs 27,000-crore second phase of expansion of its Kalinganagar project in Odisha in November 2018.

The new blast furnace, with a volume of 5,870 m3, is equipped with state-of-the-art features for long campaign life and an eco-friendly design to optimise the steelmaking process. The blast furnace will also have a zero-process water discharge plan with rainwater harvesting.

The Phase II expansion of the facility, which commenced commercial production in May 2016 is supported by a ₹27,000 crore investment, the steelmaker said in an exchange filing.

With the current expansion, Tata Steel's capacity across sites in Odisha is at 14.6 mt. In Jharkhand, Tata Steel's capacity is at 12 mt, of which Jamshedpur Works is at 11 mt