TPT November 2007

From the AmericaS

› In other news of US Steel, the company on 17August announced formation of a Texas-centered distribution network for sales of oil country tubular goods in the US. The initiative, which grew out of the USS acquisition of Dallas-based Lone Star Technologies and its related companies earlier this year, named the following as authorized United States Steel OCTG distributors: Cinco Pipe & Supply, Energy Tubulars, JD Rush, Pipeco Services, Premier Pipe, Red Man Pipe & Supply, Republic Supply International, Alexander Steel Sales, Sooner Pipe, and Toolpushers Supply. The distributors will be responsible as well for selling both seamless and electric resistance welded (ERW) tubular goods into OCTG markets. Joe Alvarado, USS vice president-Tubular, said, “US Steel is now the largest supplier of OCTG in the United States, and we are committed to marketing our products in North America through a selective, authorized distribution network.”

Iraq because looters steal copper cable as quickly as it is installed), theft of metal for scrap is now committed in nearly every state of the US. Over the 18 months to midsummer – a period during which copper prices briefly reached $4 a pound, highest in recent memory – metal theft reached alarming proportions. As reported in the New York Times (July 31), thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, raided air-conditioning systems in schools, and pulled catalytic converters from cars, then sold the stolen metal to scrap recyclers. Hardest-hit have been California farmers, whose copper-intensive irrigation systems over broad acreages tend to be in remote places where law enforcement is stretched thin. According to the Agricultural Crime Technology Information and Operations Network (ACTION), a grassroots project that supplements official crime prevention agencies in the San Joaquin Valley, metal theft from farmers in California rose 400 per cent in 2006, over 2005. And through the end of June 2007 there were nearly 1,000 incidents of scrap metal theft on farms, causing losses of more than $2 billion. ACTION (Visalia, California) has mounted a vigorous counterattack, incorporating new technologies, computer analysis, a crime data base, training, networking, and community education. • Copper thieves in California are believed to work their way from the north through the Central Valley, to Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, where they sell to recyclers who quickly get the metal to the port and onto a ship. No doubt the victimized farmers would welcome a statewide law like that enacted

Elsewhere in metals

High demand and soaring prices for copper set off a near-epidemic in the US of theft of metal for scrap Record-level prices for copper, attributed largely to the building boom in Asia, have caused theft of scrap metal, copper in particular, to spread rapidly throughout American industry. Normally a problem in developing counties and war zones (electricity remains crippled in

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N ovember /D ecember 2007