Topy Industries said Thursday it has restarted the electric arc furnace at its Toyohashi plant in central Japan ahead of schedule after it was shut October 25 due to an explosion.
The mini-mill under Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp had been aiming to restart late November but this was brought forward after repair works went smoothly, a company official said. "Production has not returned to normal levels because we are putting a priority on safety, but it is gradually increasing and we hope to reach normal production as soon as possible, maybe early in December," he said. The plant had been operating at full capacity before the stoppage.
Its rerolling plants have been operating normally during the furnace outage using stockpiled billet and supply from other steel producers and the company would continue receiving billet from other producers until it had covered the production loss from the outage, the official added.
The EAF has about 80,000 mt/month of crude steel production capacity and hosts rolling capacity of almost double that, the official added.
A Nagoya-based scrap trader said Topy has resumed receiving scrap Monday but only for limited grades such as Shindachi material. "Scrap consumption by the company won't increase rapidly; the supply-demand balance of scrap in the area may stay soft for a while," he added.
