The "Golden Twenties" – a term that awakens fascinating images before our inner eyes. Pictures of capital cities, jazz musicians, dancing, Varieté performances and women with cigarette holders – all of them clichés. But economically, the 1920s were also a time of over-capacities, price downturns and tough, diverse crises in the Weimar Republic.
This resulted, especially in the Ruhr region, in impetus for rationalization during which the industry replaces small and unprofitable production facilities with large-scale plants: concentration and formation of groups of companies were the buzzwords. Coal and metallurgy were no exception here; these processes were also subjected to this trend in wide-scale dimensions. In this way, 17 completely newly built large-scale coking plants were created in the Ruhr region at the end of the 1920s – one of which was the Hansa coking plant.
The coking plant started up its operations in 1928 and at times, was one of the biggest coking plants in the Ruhr region over the course of its history. It knew no standstill and covered the incredible demand of numerous smelting works that needed coke to produce pig iron.
In the process, production was a continuous give and take. That’s because Hansa was connected with the most varied operations of the coal and steel industry in the Dortmund region: the coking plant got the hard coal to be coked from the neighboring mines. It delivered its coke to the smelting plant Dortmunder Union that was located close by. From there, it, in turn, procured furnace gas, that was created when melting down pig iron. The coking plant used this lean gas to heat its coke oven, and delivered purified coke gas to the industry and households.