India: RINL blast furnace glitch may keep Nov production down m-o-m

Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL's) November production may be lower than October's, impacted by a temporary shut-down of one of its three blast furnaces.

Blast furnaces 3 (BF3) underwent a 10-15 days maintenance shutdown due to a technical glitch. As a result, RINL suffered a loss of around 7,000 tonnes per day (tpd) of hot metal output over this period, sources informed SteelMint.

However, sources informed that the BF in question is gradually limping back to normalcy and may soon start producing around 18,000 tpd of hot metal, although this process may take some more time. The temporary shut-down reduced hot metal output to 10,000-11,000 tpd.

The technical glitch involved water seepage and chilling of the furnace. In normal circumstances, this takes more than a month to get repaired. However, a source informed that "early detection" and "experience" helped to combat the situation well.

It was heard, a second blast furnace is also encountering technical issues and the quality of its hot metal showed traces of silica above the permissible limit. Thus, this material had to be converted into pig iron.

October performance

Consequent to BF3 being in maintenance mode from end-October, production in the month of Oct'21 remained almost flat at 4.50 lakh tonnes (lt) against 4.48 lt in Sept'21.

Sales for the month took an almost 15% dip to 4.45 lt compared to 5.21 lt in September.

October-end's closing stock of around 2.20 lt hardly showed any movement against September-end's 2.21 lt, as per information available with SteelMint.

Outlook

RINL's November production is expected to be lower m-o-m. This may translate into lesser billets and rebar volumes in the market in the short term and help keep longs prices supported for primary mills. RINL is amongst the top ten integrated steel producer in terms of capacity. It has a capacity of 7.2 mnt but produces around 5-5.5 mnt per annum.