Grupo Celsa’s (Celsa) steelmaking facility in Castellbisbal, near Barcelona, suffered an outage on May 4 as a result of a fire on one of the plants two continuous casters, according to sources close to the company.
The same sources commented that while the fire-damaged continuous caster remains inoperative, the company expects to resume production from the affected continuous casting line in the coming days.
Davis Index has heard anecdotal evidence from the same sources that inbound US-origin deepsea ferrous scrap cargoes had been diverted to the company’s other Spanish steelmaking facility, Celsa Nervacero in Bilbao.
Celsa Barcelona operates a 2.5mn mt per annum electric arc furnace meltshop, with downstream rolling mills capable of producing smooth and corrugated round bars, wire rod, angles, and structural profiles.
Celsa Nervacero operates a 1mn mt per annum electric arc furnace 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.