A most serious sandstorm in a decade has attacked most of North and Northwest China on the morning of March 15, closely following a heavy smog for the previous few days, and logistics services in the ferrous community have been slowed down with traffic lights being hardly visible in some areas, market sources grudged on the morning of March 15.
“The bright side is that the smog that had been hovering above Beijing for over ten days has been blown away by the yellow wind,” a Beijing-based steel market source joked.
China Meteorological Administration (CMA) sent the yellow alert of the sandstorm, which was to sweep across Inner Mongolia, Beijing, Shanxi and Hebei in North China and Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia in Northwest China, though it will probably disappear by Monday evening.
Other than the logistics by various degrees depending on the seriousness, the sandstorm has not forced the construction site to halt operations, though, a second Beijing source observed.
“Construction projects are progressing in the yellow wind, and the steel trading is still ongoing,” he said.
Tangshan city, China’s top steel production base in Hebei, has been engulfed by the sandstorm, but its local steel mills have not felt much difference as their operations have already been severely curtailed by the ongoing restrictions due to the persistent poor air quality anyway, an official from a local mill confirmed.
Besides, “it has not been as dirty and dusty as in Beijing,” she added.
Steel mills in Tangshan have been trimming or idling their blast furnaces one by one since March 11, as Mysteel Global reported.
As of Monday morning, the HRB400 20mm dia rebar price in Beijing was largely steady, down Yuan 4/t from last Friday to Yuan 4,734/tonne ($728.3/t) including the 13% VAT, according to Mysteel’s assessment.
In comparison, though, Inner Mongolia, China’s major coal production base, has been attacked by the sandstorm more severely.
“I feel that it is snowing with dust, and visibility is almost zero and the road has been emptied,” a steel trader in Inner Mongolia said, and “schools have been shut and businesses are off with people taking the day off,” he added.
The sandstorm, one of the severest in the past many years, though, has renewed the market doubt on the effectiveness of the pollution control despite the past years’ curbing efforts.
“Have we really achieved much at all in improving the environment and ecology in the past few years? This is like a horror movie with no special effect needed at all,” a citizen in Tianjin commented.
This, however, may solidify Beijing’s determination to crack down on polluting industries and deforestation in North China in the long run, market sources commented.
Written by Olivia Zhang, zhangwd@mysteel.com
This article has been published under an article exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and SteelMint.
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