News & Press Releases

Primetals Technologies is pleased to announce the start-up of an electric arc furnace it supplied to global specialty materials producer ATI for its Latrobe, Pennsylvania, USA facility. The arc furnace is designed to process a wide range of input materials and will replace equipment coming to the end of its useful life. The project also included the hydraulics for furnace movement and automation systems.

In June, Primetals Technologies received an order from Kobe Steel, Ltd. for a steel plate finishing rolling mill for its Kakogawa Works located in Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. Implementation is scheduled for the late 2023 to early 2024. This project aims to counter the aging of the existing mill, which came online in 1972, and to strengthen the product supply system with stable quality and delivery time. Primetals Technologies will supply the steel plate finishing rolling mill, auxiliary and ancillary equipment, as well as on-site supervision for erection and commissioning.

Primetals Technologies has received an order from Pak Steel to supply a bar rolling mill for the site located in the Hattar Special Economic Zone (HSEZ), in Khyber Pakhthunkwa province. The new mill will enable Pak Steel to enlarge its footprint in the growing regional market of infrastructure projects. The mill will manufacture concrete reinforcement steel bars (rebars) with diameters ranging from 8 to 40 millimeters. The design capacity will be 450,000 metric tons per year. The billets will be directly charged in hot condition to the rolling mill, which will provide significant energy savings as well as higher metallic yield. The commissioning into operation of the mill is scheduled in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) Australia and Primetals Technologies, a member of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) Group, have joined Australia’s Heavy Industry Low-Carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre (HILT CRC) as key partners. The Centre, a not-for-profit entity with significant government funding, aims to develop technologies to decarbonize Australia’s heavy industrial sector, leverage the country’s natural endowments in mineral and clean energy resources and seize the opportunity of growing export markets for certified low-carbon products. Over the next 10 years, Primetals Technologies and MHI Australia will be contributing financially as well as with their decades-long experience in iron and steel production to this effort. The companies will focus on research and development of hydrogen-based direct reduction of iron ore. This includes the novel HYFOR (hydrogen-based fine-ore reduction) technology currently being piloted by Primetals Technologies in Europe.

The German steel producer BGH Edelstahlwerke GmbH has granted Primetals Technologies final acceptance certification for a new argon oxygen decarburization (AOD) converter, thereby expanding the company's electric steel mill in Freital, Saxony. The new converter supplements and reduces the workload of the existing vacuum oxygen decarburization (VOD) plant. With low capital investment costs, production can be made more flexible and the specific consumption of raw materials, refractory materials, electrical energy and operating materials can be reduced. At the same time, productivity is increased due to shorter treatment times and the quality of the end products is further improved. The planned capacity of the extended steel mill corresponds to an output of about 120,000 metric tons of stainless and special steel per year. Primetals Technologies received the order at the beginning of 2019.