The Utah Proposal
Cochrane was a Canadian expatriate with a master’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of British Columbia. After graduation he pursued studies in a new technology referred to as the “continuous casting process” or concast, for producing steel. The attraction of the process is that steel can be rendered into small shaped billets directly from a molten state. This eliminates the need for blast furnaces , open-hearth furnaces, reheat furnaces and primary rolling equipment (see Figure 1). Cochrane calculated that he could reduce manufacturing cost by as much as 50 percent over conventional methods.