Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP), a unit of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), has ended 2010-11 with record production levels of hot metal and crude steel.
The steel plant clocked an output of 2.303 million tonnes (mt) of hot metal from its blast furnaces and 2.16 mt of crude steel from its Steel Melting Shops (SMS) in the last fiscal, the plant's best ever since its inception. RSP's saleable steel production from its finishing mills stood at 2.03 mt.
This is for the second time that the steel unit has breached the two million tonne production benchmark in areas of hot metal, crude steel and saleable steel.
Despite the imported coal crisis since December 2010 that threatened the performance of the blast furnaces, the steel plant overcame the challenge to secure a new benchmark in hot metal production.
In the area of saleable steel, all time best production figure of 0.320 mt was achieved in production of hot rolled plates, a value added item in RSP’s product basket.
Similarly, two other value added products of the steel plant namely, Electric Resistance Weld (ERW) Pipes and Spiral Weld (SW) Pipes achieved production levels of 49,000 tonnes and 35,000 tonnes, registering a growth of 49 per cent and 31 per cent respectively over 2009-10.
The steel plant had commenced 2010-11 with the twin strategy of maximizing volume of production and improving its techno-economic parameters for bringing down the cost of production to sustain its profitability in the face of adverse input prices.
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In line with this, RSP continued its growth momentum through better capacity utilization registering a growth of nearly two per cent each in hot metal, crude steel and saleable steel production.
Simultaneously, the steel plant also achieved all time best annual figures in vital techno-economic parameters like coke rate per tonne of hot metal, blast furnace productivity, specific energy consumption per tonne of crude steel and specific water consumption per ton of crude steel.