The Essar Steel complex at Hazira, Gujarat, West India has more than doubled its capacity to 10Mt/y from its earlier 4Mt/y capacity.

This expansion makes the Hazira Steel Complex the largest single location flat steel producer in India and the fourth largest single location flat steel producer globally. With this expansion the complex is now able to offer the entire range of flat products from thin strip to heavy plate, large diameter pipe, cold rolled and coated products.

This steel plant will play a major role in meeting the needs of capital and consumable goods, shipbuilding and the automobile sector. Being a port-based plant, its strategic location makes it a ideal gateway for meeting the global demand for steel. Indeed, it has set up a Service Centre network at various locations in India as well as in the UK, Middle East, Indonesia and Vietnam to provide cut to length sizes with JIT delivery.

The facilities present at Hazira consists of a 30Mt/y capacity all weather port through which Essar Steel brings in raw materials and ships out finished goods at low cost.
The complex includes a captive power plant to meet the power requirement across the site.
Iron and steelmaking facilities consist of:

  • The world’s largest gas-based sponge iron (DRI) plant with a capacity of 6.8Mt/y using both natural gas and gas from its two Corex units. There is a hot charging facility for DRI to the six electric arc furnaces.

  • One 2200m3 blast furnace with a productivity of 2.5t/m3 and two Corex units each with a capacity of 870kt/y for charging liquid iron into the EAFs and Conarc furnaces. These facilities enable flexibility in raw material inputs for steelmaking in any proportions of hot DRI and liquid iron from the Corex units or blast furnace.

  • A new coke oven plant of 1.35Mt/y capacity is under construction to make the site self sufficient in coke required for the BF and to a lesser extent the Corex units.

  • For steelmaking, four DC electric arc furnace (EAF) with total capacity of 4.6Mt/y, plus two Conarc furnaces (SMS Siemag’s combined EAF + BOF units) recently put into operation each of capacity 2.5Mt/y.

  • For steel processing: Conventional slab and thin slab casters for rolling to hot rolled coil and to plate.

  • Cold rolling mill and galvanising plant for production of coil and sheet.

  • A plate mill of 1.5Mt/y capable of producing 5m wide plates in normalised, quenched and tempered condition suitable for line pipe and other applications.

  • Pipe mill for large diameter pipe 600kt/y capacity using the wide plate.