This technique is often used on the pins and axles of large equipment such as cranes, ships, bridges, and sluice-gates.

In addition, thermal lancing is used to clean the bottom of steel furnace pots, which accumulate a skull layer of slag and iron during operation.

[5] Burning steel wool is simply the rapid oxidation of iron into Fe2O3; the thermal lance uses steel in the form of rods rather than wool, the rods will burn with a sufficiently high supply of concentrated oxygen.

[9][10] Leo Malcher filed for a patent in 1922 entitled "Process of attacking compact mineral material, noncombustible in oxygen".

The patent uses "a suitable disintegrating flux to act upon the material at the point where it is desired to attack it ... the fuel employed in the example to be described is metallic iron, and is arranged in the form of two concentric pipes".