Posted on 14 Mar 2023
Sohar Steel owner Middle East Traders Oman has inked an agreement to sell the steelmaker to Vulcan Steel, owner of Jindal Shadeed Iron and Steel (JSIS) and part of the OP Jindal Group, Kallanish learns from an informed source.
Sohar Steel, commissioned in 2008, suspended production in March 2022. It has an electric arc furnace-based melting shop with 600,000 tonnes/year of billet capacity and rolling mill with 650,000 t/y rebar capacity. The firm will modify the rolling mill to also produce wire rod in the coming months. It is located in close proximity to JSIS’s steelworks.
Sohar Steel’s purchase would go some way to consolidating Oman’s rebar production capacity, which also includes Muscat Steel Industries and Hadid Majan. The latter produces intermittently. Moon Iron & Steel, meanwhile, remains idle after suspending production shortly after its commissioning. Due to limited consumption in Oman’s domestic market, a significant portion of production has to be exported.
In the second quarter of 2021, to reduce debt, Jindal Steel & Power completed the sale of its shareholding in the Oman-based Shadeed steelworks to Vulcan Steel (see Kallanish passim).
Sohar-based JSIS’s 2.4 million t/y capacity electric arc furnace melt shop feeds both square and round billet casters. The works also has a 1.8m t/y hot direct reduced/hot-briquetted iron plant and a 1.4m t/y rebar mill. In 2019, Shadeed commissioned a new SMS-supplied high-speed billet caster with eight strands and a vacuum degassing facility to produce SBQ steel grades.
JSIS has applied to the government for land allocation of more than 100km2 for a solar farm near to its Sohar facility. The company was also preparing to expand its DRI production from 1.8mt to 2mt in the 2023 fiscal year following technological upgrades.
JSIS signed a land allocation agreement for its new flat steel manufacturing plant in Oman’s Special Economic Zone in Duqm (Sezad), together with a memorandum of understanding for natural gas supply to the plant. The new works will be designed to produce “green” steel and is scheduled to be completed in 2026, with an investment cost of $3 billion. It will produce 5m t/y of flats, including thin gauges of hot rolled coil (see Kallanish passim).
Source:Kallanish
