Sweden's largest steel producer SSAB said Wednesday its blast furnace in the northern town of Lulea was now turning out premium quality steel after undergoing full modernization lasting more than three months.
A spokesman for SSAB told Platts output at Lulea, which produces 2.3 million mt/year, was down from June until mid September but was now up again.
SSAB also said the blast furnaces in Raahe in Finland were modernized as recently as 2011 and an investment in a pulverized coal injection system had now been completed there.
Production was never down at the Raahe plant, which has two blast furnaces producing 1.3 million mt/year each.
SSAB spokesman Andreas Koch said the work at the plants did not have an impact on their production levels, but extended the plants lives and made them more cost efficient.
"We will be saving money but there is no change to capacity," Koch said.
SSAB said this investment would reduce the group's annual costs by around SEK200 million ($23.3 million) from 2016 onwards.
The company said after 15 years in constant operation, the Lulea blast furnace had undergone complete modernization and was set to continue production for another 15 to 20 years.
It said that in addition to replacing the hearth carbon refractories and furnace cooling staves, a new casthouse dedusting filter was fitted.
The two converters were renewed at the steel mill in Lulea, where the old coke plant quenching tower was also replaced.
In Raahe, a pulverized coal injection system replaced an earlier heavy fuel oil injection system in the blast furnaces.
SSAB said this would result in more cost-effective steel production and lower raw material costs.
Work under way on replacing the converters at the steel mill in Raahe would be completed next year, it added.
SSAB said the blast furnaces in Raahe and Oxelosund supplied the company's rolling mills during the modernization process at Lulea.
It said the smaller of the two blast furnaces in Oxelosund was idled in mid October when Lulea restarted.
SSAB's five blast furnaces in the Nordic region have a total capacity of around 6.4 million mt. One blast furnace is in Lulea and two are in both Oxelosund and Raahe.
