POSCO India’s steel plant in Orissa will be the world's first steel plant project to start with FINEX and Mini Flat Mill, and it is expected to set benchmarks for the global steel industry. These processes are environment-friendly technologies with high productivity and cost effectiveness. FINEX: The groundbreaking, eco-friendly FINEX technology has been chosen over the Blast Furnace route for the POSCO-India project. FINEX, which POSCO has indigenously developed, is an environment-friendly iron-making process that allows the direct use of iron ore fines and non-coking coal as feedstock. In addition to significantly lowering operating costs and emissions compared to the Blast Furnace process, FINEX dramatically reduces overall construction costs by eliminating the need for sinter and coke plants. Moreover, a FINEX plant occupies only 60 per cent of the area of a Blast Furnace plant of equal capacity, thereby requiring less space to operate. Mini Flat Mill This new-generation technology will be used in the POSCO India project along with FINEX. Mini Flat Mill is a new process that decisively shortens the production chain from crude steel to hot rolled strip. In conventional hot strip production, the route runs from the continuous slab caster via storage and dressing, then onwards through the slab reheating furnace to the hot strip mill with its roughing train. The MFM technology, however, enables direct casting and rolling continuously, which are discontinuous in the conventional process. This process allows savings in investment, energy consumption and operating costs. Thanks to the technology improvements of MFM, it is used to produce not only steel in the low and medium carbon range, but also the entire spectrum of steel grades, including stainless ferritic and austenitic grades, as well as grain-oriented silicon steels. It is a futuristic new technology and involves a major reconfiguration of the overall steel mill structure.