Sidor, Venezuela's largest steelmaker, has resumed production of crude steel and billets, the company said Thursday.
The steelmaker said Thursday in a statement that furnace No. 1 restarted Wednesday, but furnace No. 2 remains offline.
"The first round of rebar production will be directed to the construction sector," Sidor said.
Company president Justo Noguera Pietri said Sidor "aims to produce 300,000 mt of crude steel in the medium term," adding it plans to resume production soon on other furnaces and lines.
No information was disclosed about current production levels.
Sidor's vice president, Jesus Ramirez, said "the next goal is to resume operation at the furnaces No. 5 and 6 of the steel slab area, thus restarting the company's flat operations."
The National Electric Corporation, or Corpoelec, has helped Sidor restart some of its 430 MWh-capacity thermoelectric plant that had gone offline. Under an agreement with Sidor, Corpoelec will eventually send 250 MWh of its supply to the steelmaker to resume operations. Of that about 70-90 MWh is now available to Sidor, it said in a statement.
But mill sources say Sidor would need around 135 MWh to operate the billets facility and 140 MWh to operate the slabs area.
Corpoelec stopped providing Sidor electrical power in March, blaming a potential system collapse because of low water levels at the country's main power provider, the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant, also known as Guri Dam.
The billets and slabs areas, which have been halted since January, had been ready to resume operations since March after the company completed maintenance and after the arrival of inputs and needed raw materials.
The company's flats operations have been halted since December, while its long steel operations have been halted since January.
Sidor's installed capacity allows production of 425,000 mt/month, or 5.1 million mt/year of crude steel. It also can produce 2.8 million mt/year of hot-rolled coils, 1.7 million mt/year of cold-rolled coils, 390,000 mt/year of rebars and 600,000 mt/year of wire rods, among other products.
