Circular Economy

Coal tar, a by-product of the coke-making process in China Steel Corporation, is further processed by China Steel Chemical Corporation, a subsidiary of CSC Group, to increase its economic value. After dehydration, pre-distillation, and distillation, some chemical materials, such as naphthalene, creosote oil, and soft pitch, are obtained from coal tar. Among these, naphthalene and creosote oil can be supplied to the petrochemical industry as feedstock materials, and soft pitch can be further processed to produce a series of high-value carbon materials with good quality.

So far, four major high quality products can be derived from soft pitch.

• Firstly, soft pitch can be heat-treated to obtain refined pitch, which is widely used as a binder for graphite electrodes.
• Secondly, if a series of heat treatments and graphitization are applied, soft pitch can be transformed into meso-graphite powders, which can be used as anode materials for lithium batteries.
• Thirdly, after soft pitch is subjected to chemical activation reaction, cleaning, and powder property adjustment, advanced carbon powder with a high specific surface area can be produced. Advanced carbon powder is widely used in supercapacitors.
• Finally, soft pitch can undergo compression, sintering, and graphitization processes to form isotropic graphite blocks, which are used in various applications, such as metallurgical crucibles and casting molds.