British Steel Begins Construction of New Billet Caster at Scunthorpe

New Steel Billet Caster in the Works

Stack of steel billet products in the steel plant. British steel

Longs producer British Steel has begun constructing a billet casting machine at its Scunthorpe works. It will be the second such machine built at the site, which lies in England’s East Midlands region.
On June 15th, the company said that the continuous caster should come on stream in late 2022. Once in operation, it will produce square billet in 140x140mm, 155x155mm, and 180x180mm sizes.
“The new caster will produce billets of an even higher standard, with much better internal and surface qualities,” said Richard Longbottom, Technical Manager of Steelmaking Development. “We’ll also have a broader product range. This enables us to become more competitive and expand our offering to customers.”

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Spokespeople for the company added that Italian firm Danieli will supply the new equipment. However, they declined to say what the new casting machine’s capacity would be or how many strands it would have.
The existing eight-strand billet caster can cast an estimated 900,000 metric tons per year of semi-finished product. That includes 150x150mm and 180x180mm sizes made out of the crude steel produced on site.
The plant could originally produce about 4.5 million metric tons of crude steel per year via four on-site blast furnaces and three 300-metric ton converters. The spokesman noted, however, that the plant is no longer pouring those volumes. Billets act as a feedstock for rolling rebar, merchant bar sections as well as wire rod.
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British Steel Remains a Major Player in the Metals Market

The new caster is part of an £80 million ($98 million) upgrade project for Scunthorpe, in England’s East Midlands. Whilst the majority of that total is intended to finance the new billet caster at £48 million ($59 million), the remainder is to upgrade and reconfigure Scunthorpe’s wire rod mill.
“The product range will also offer customers considerably improved mechanical properties and enhanced options for supply condition,” the company stated. “[Examples include] normalized rolled and low-temperature rolled wire rod.”
The company also indicated that British Steel could produce up to 3 million metric tons per year of rolled long products. Besides wire rod in 5.5-17mm diameters, Scunthorpe rolls construction steels (sections) and rail. Meanwhile, the Teesside mill rolls construction steels and the Skinningrove works, which sites about 100 kilometers north of Scunthorpe, rolls special profiles.
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Other Scunthorpe Steel Capabilities

Scunthorpe can also cast blooms from a six-strand continuous caster as well as slab in 225mm- and 298mm-gauges from a two-strand casting machine. Each caster has a listed capacity of 1.2 million metric tons per year.
Billets from the new caster will also go to the British Steel’s FN Steel plant, in the Netherlands. Reports indicate that the facility can roll at least 350,000 metric tons per year of wire rod in 5.5-30mm diameters.
Applications for British Steel’s rolled wire rod include tire reinforcement, automotive spring and steels, as well as rail clips. Chinese steelmaking and chemicals conglomerate Jingye Group acquired British Steel in 2020. Greybull Capital originally formed British Steel in 2016 when it acquired the Long Products business from Tata Steel.
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