EoW September 2008

T ransat lant ic Cable

Elsewhere in steel . . . US Steel Corp (Pittsburgh) and SunCoke Energy Inc (Haverhill, Ohio) ❈ ❈ have broken ground on a $570 million project at the steel company’s Granite City Works in Granite City, Illinois. SunCoke Energy subsidiary Gateway Energy and Coke Co will construct, own and operate heat recovery coke ovens with an annual coke-making capability of 650,000 tons produced with SunCoke Energy’s low-emissions technology. As reported in St Louis Business Journal, the project, announced in 2006, includes the construction of a cogeneration plant that will provide electricity to the Granite City Works. The cogeneration facility will be owned and operated by US Steel, which will provide $280 million of the joint capital investment programme. Construction was expected to take 18months. In brief . . . First Quantum Minerals, a Canadian miner of copper in Zambia and ❈ ❈ Congo, has agreed to buy Scandinavian Minerals to gain a nickel mine in Finland. The purchase price of about $280 million values Scandinavian Minerals at a 41% premium to its closing price. The transaction will give Vancouver-based First Quantum full control of the Kevitsa property in northern Finland, which has indicated and inferred resources that Scandinavian Minerals places as high as 831 million metric tons of nickel ore.

share of a new joint venture for the production and distribution of long steel products and plate in the Balkans, Turkey, Cyprus, and North Africa. Sidenor is the largest producer of steel in Greece, with additional steelmaking, rolling, and reinforcing mesh operations in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. Sidenor’s total steel production in 2007 was nearly 2 million tons. It recently started up a new rolling mill at its Stomana Industry plant in Bulgaria, which will bring the company’s total steel rolling capacity to more than 3.6 million metric tons per year by 2009. Nucor also announced that will pay approximately $658 million for a 50% equity stake in Duferdofin-Nucor Srl, a new joint venture being created with Duferco SA for the production of beams in Italy and their distribution in Europe and North Africa. The joint venture will include the Duferco Group’s Italian long product production assets and associated distribution companies. The new affiliation will very likely make Duferdofin-Nucor the leader in beam production in Italy and Southern Europe. Production of beams and other long products from Duferdofin-Nucor’s plants in San Zeno, Pallanzeno, and Giamorro (all in Italy) exceeded 900,000 metric tons in 2007. A new merchant bar mill is under construction in Giamorro and is expected to be operational in late 2008. Additional investments in the Italian operations are under review by the two companies. Nucor is itself the largest producer of beams in North America, with total production in 2007 of some 3 million tons.

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EuroWire – September 2008