Grupo Celsa’s (Celsa) steelmaking facility in Castellbisbal, near Barcelona, has suffered a ten-day outage in the week of May 11, 2020, according to three separate sources.
Davis Index learnt from the same sources that inbound US-origin deepsea ferrous scrap cargoes were diverted to the company’s other Spanish steelmaking facility, Celsa Nervacero in Bilbao. Celsa were unable to provide comment on the incident at the time of publication.
Celsa Barcelona operates a 2.5mn mt per annum electric arc furnace (EAF) meltshop, with downstream rolling mills capable of producing smooth and corrugated round bars, wire rod, angles, and structural profiles.
Its Nervacero plant operates a 1mn mt per annum EAF meltshop, with downstream rolling mills capable of producing a wide range of billets and reinforcing bars.
The diversion of deepsea ferrous scrap shipments to the company’s Bilbao facility will likely keep the mill well supplemented in the near term given its much smaller size and the likelihood it is operating well below full capacity due to decimated downstream steel demand.
On the other hand, Celsa Barcelona upon return to pre-incident production rates will likely have to compensate for the displaced ferrous scrap volumes and source additional material from local and seaborne markets in the short term. This may prove challenging for the Spanish steel producer given that some UK & EU ferrous scrap suppliers were heard to be operating short positions and offering 45-day delivery terms on new cargoes.