One family, three men and countless blast furnaces – the Peters family has been helping shape the success of the Duisburg location since 1911, when it was part of Phoenix Actien-Gesellschaft, to the present day under ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe AG. “It’s not unusual in the Ruhr for several generations of a family to work for the same company,” says Dr. Michael Peters, Head of Hot Metal at ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe, commenting on the 100 years his grandfather, father and he himself have worked for the company. “The generations before us achieved a lot,” he says with some pride. “Without them our present-day plant with its quality and globality wouldn’t be possible.”

Jakob Peters – Dr. Michael Peters’ grandfather, was the first of the three Peters to work for the steelmaker and its predecessor companies. One of seven children, he left his parents’ farm in the Eifel region of Germany in 1911 and started work at Phoenix Actien-Gesellschaft the same year. “In my grandfather’s day there were only two big employers in Duisburg. One of them was Phoenix in the Ruhrort district,” says Dr. Michael Peters. In the 1920s Jakob Peters, a tall, lean man, worked as a blast furnace foreman – in 1926 there were five blast furnaces in Ruhrort with an aggregate volume of 2,490 cubic meters. On his retirement in 1956 he was blast furnace plant manager.

Dr. Karl-Heinz Peters – Dr. Michael Peters’ father – began his career at August Thyssen-Hütte AG in 1953 as an assistant and rose up through the hierarchy to become plant manager. “My father participated in the post-war reconstruction process, helped modernize the blast furnace operations of the Thyssen group and developed them into Germany’s largest facility,” says Peters. Before retiring at the age of 67, he supervised the start-up of the main blast furnace. Despite his successful career, his father was adamant that his son should not work at the steel mill. “He assumed I would do the opposite of what he said,” says Peters. “And that’s exactly what I did.”

Today some 1,400 people work under Dr. Michael Peters (center), whose area of responsibility includes the Schwelgern and Hamborn plants. “Even as a young man and a student I earned my pocket money at the steel mill,” he says. After studying metallurgy at the Clausthal-Zellerfeld Technical University, he traveled overseas to learn more about the world of steelmaking, spending time in the USA, Canada and Japan. Peters began his career at ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe in 1982 as an assistant. Like his forefathers, he is driven by a passion for blast furnaces.

Dr. Michael Peters was in charge of the construction of blast furnace 8. It was the first plant of its kind to be built in Europe for ten years. Featuring state-of-the-art environmental technology, the 250 million euro investment at the Hamborn plant has been producing around two million metric tons of hot metal annually since 2008. Altogether the blast furnaces at the Hamborn and Schwelgern plants, which are among the most efficient in the world, produce over twelve million tons of hot metal a year.