Gulf Exporters

Steel producer sees bigger role

The Emirates Steel plant in Abu Dhabi

Emirates Steel has shipped some 200,000 tonnes of high-quality structural steel to mega oil and gas projects across the world and is working at producing new customised sheet piling designs, chief executive has said.

Saeed Ghumran Al Romaithi also highlighted that the company’s efforts to build its product portfolio of heavy and jumbo sections had resulted in a rolling capacity of 3.5 million tonnes annually.

“We look forward to continuing the growth momentum with enhancements undergoing to produce new customised sheet piling designs, which will be manufactured in grades meeting the EN S355 GP, S390 GP and S430 GP standards,” said Al Romaithi in remarks on the occasion of Adipec, a leading platform for the oil and gas industry held in Abu Dhabi last month and which it co-sponsored.

Emirates Steel is owned by Senaat, the UAE’s largest industrial conglomerate and a driving force for implementing the Abu Dhabi Government’s industrial diversification policy.

The steel firm is currently the only producer of jumbo and heavy sections in the Middle East. Its client portfolio includes some of the most well-known names in the oil and gas arena.

Global recipients of its offerings in the oil and gas industry are excellence centres in the GCC, India and the US, national and international oil and gas companies and oilfield service providers, among other buyers.

Projects it has supplied in the industry include Adnoc Carbon Black, Adnoc/Zadco UZ750 (Upper Zakum Offshore Oil Field Development in Abu Dhabi), Aramco Khemya, Aramco Jizzan Refinery, Aramco Petro-Rabigh, Aramco Sadara, BP Khazzan and Rabab Harweel by Petroleum Development Oman, KNPC Kuwait Clean Fuel, Cameron LNG new liquefied natural gas export terminals in North America and Zachry LNG in the US.

Emirates Steel has also been part of Masdar and Adnoc’s first CO2 capture, usage and storage project in the Middle East. The core idea is to utilise the CO2 generated by Emirates Steel plants to feed the project when it goes operational, with plans to sequester up to 730,000 tons of CO2 annually, which is equivalent to planting around 100,000 trees – a massive contribution to Emirates Steel’s carbon footprint.

The huge initiative includes three elements; industrial capture of the CO2 from the Emirates Steel’s facilities; compression, dehydration and transportation of the CO2 from the Masdar carbon capture facility (CCF) to an Adnoc onshore oil field, and finally use of injected CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

The project will liberate precious natural methane gas (traditionally used to pressurise oil wells and aid oil recovery) to instead be used for traditional power generation and water desalination. 

To meet accelerating demand in domestic and regional markets for HRC products; mainly pipes used in the oil and gas sector currently imported to the region; Emirates Steel’s future plans includes further strengthening its position as a preferred reliable supplier and expanding its products range to meet the requirements of different industrial sectors including oil and gas and energy, the company said.

Its current product range includes; straight length reinforcing bar (rebar) and rebar in coil, wire rod, hot rolled structural steel sections, which include beams, columns, channels and sheet piles, in addition to value-added products; stronger steel with higher tensile strengths and steels with special mechanical properties so that lesser quantity of steel is required by customers.

Emirates Steel has already started supplying high-value steel products used in nuclear plants for the UAE’s first peaceful nuclear energy program for power generation, and has also introduced a number of additional grades of wire-rod with diverse chemical compositions and distinctive physical properties, offering flexibly to cater for different applications. Its coil mill has the shortest rolling programme cycle of any major steelmaker in the GCC region, enabling the company to cater for short lead times for its local industrial users.

It achieved deliveries of 2.27 million tonnes through to the end of the third quarter of 2015, an increase of over 6 per cent over the same period in 2014.