Tokyo Steel, Japan’s leading electric arc furnace producer, will resume hot rolled coil (HRC) production at its Okayama plant located in Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture), western Japan, at the end of CY’22. It may be recalled, operations at Okayama had been suspended since April 2015 due to the aging of the hot-rolling line and sluggish orders, as per Japan Metal Daily
The suspension was mainly due to the declining demand. The EAF major has since then been producing flats steel only at its Tahara works in central Japan and sending the HRC feeds to Okayama for processing. The latter, meanwhile, has been producing long products like H-beams, channels and rebar.
The company has already made a capital investment of around 7.5 billion yen towards this project. In order to restart the hot rolling line, the company will rebuilt the production system at both the Tahara (Tahara City, Aichi Prefecture) and Okayama plants.
The company’s decision comes in the wake of the growing need for electric furnace steel sheets against the backdrop of an accelerated decarbonisation drive.
Initially, the monthly production is expected to be 30,000 tonnes (t), but this will be raised to 50,000 t at a later stage.
In order to restart the Okayama hot-rolled factory, the hot-rolled line will undergo refurbishing on the heating furnaces, heat exchangers and control system equipment. In addition, the skin pass equipment has been completely renewed. By working on digital transformation, Tokyo Steel aims to improve the quality and production efficiency of steel sheets and save energy in the manufacturing process.
The volume of hot coils produced at the Okayama factory will be the same as before production stopped, of 3 and 4 widths, with a thickness of 1.5-12 mm. Even after the restart, the 5-width category will continue to be produced at the Tahara plant.
Currently, the Tahara plant produces about 120,000 t of hot coils per month. Okayama manufactures pickling coils and hot-dip galvanised coils with hot coils transferred from Tahara, but after the operation of the hot-dip line in Okayama, integrated production in the latter will be possible.
The company had been considering resumption of hot coil production in Okayama before the pandemic struck but this decision was temporarily suspended.
The needs for electric furnace hot coils has expanded rapidly, leading to resumption of HR production at Okayama in keeping with the demands of the time, Kiyoshi Imamura, Managing Director, Sales Headquarters, Tokyo Steel, is learnt to have said.
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