Coke Oven Build and Refurbish Brings Udhe $93 Million in Global Contracts

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Whatever the current state of leads and lags in the steel production market, expansion plans already put in place are keeping contractors in the industry busy. One of the companies scoring steadily in the metallurgical coke oven sector is the ThyssenKrupp Technologies (Dusseldorf, Germany) company Uhde (Dortmund, Germany), which is currently working on four projects across the world worth a total of $93.75 million.

A new coke oven battery will be built for the POSCO group (NYSE:PKX) (Pohang, South Korea) at Pohang on Korea's east coast. The new battery, which will go into operation in mid 2007, will have 75 ovens with a chamber height of 6.7 meters and a total capacity of 750,000 tons of coke per annum. The existing gas treatment unit at the site will be retrofitted with the latest technology to increase its throughput capacity from 44,000 cubic meters per hour to 100,000 cubic meters per hour.

The scope of Uhde's $43.75 million contract covers basic and detail engineering for the coke oven battery, basic engineering on the gas treatment unit, supply of equipment, and supervision of the erection and commissioning work. Uhde has worked on coke projects with POSCO for more than 20 years. Eight expansion projects for plants in Pohang and Gwangyang have already been completed, giving the steel maker a current coke supply of about 11.5 million tons per annum.

The German company is now working on the construction of a new coke oven battery for Japan's Mitsui Mining (TOKYO:3315) at Kitakyushu. The 46-oven battery will have a total capacity of 570,000 ton per annum and will come into operation in the first half of 2006. This "pad-up rebuild" contract, as it is classified, involves the replacement of the site's existing coke oven battery from the concrete foundation up.

In 2006, Uhde began major repairs on 78 ovens located at two China Steel Corporation (Taipei) coke oven batteries in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The scope of the job includes the hot repair of all ovens on the pusher and coke sides. Large sections of the heating walls, the fronts of the coke oven batteries, and the complete oven tops will be replaced. 7,000 tons of refractory material and around 2,000 tons of steel and cast parts will be used for the repair project, which is scheduled for completion in early 2008.

Argentina's major steelmaker, Siderar, has contracted Uhde to expand an existing coke plant with ten new ovens at San Nicolas, 220 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires. When the new ovens come into operation in mid-2006 they will provide an additional coke output of 105,000 tons per annum.

The Mitsui, China Steel, and Siderar contracts total $55 million and cover basic and detail engineering, the supply of special equipment, and the supervision of erection as well as commissioning of the ovens.

World steel production for 2005 is estimated at 1.12 billion tons, which will require about 365 million tons of metallurgical coke in the production process. In 2004, when steel production topped the one billion tons per annum mark for the first time in history, the industry consumed about 345 million tons of metallurgical coke.

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