A total of five domestic blast furnaces – the second unit is now also running again in Leoben-Donawitz – demand in the long steel sector is high enough.
The voestalpine AG company location in Linz
The steel group voestalpine has restarted its second blast furnace at the Leoben-Donawitz location in Upper Styria, as the company announced on Thursday. The impetus for this was again a correspondingly high demand in the long steel sector. This means that all five domestic blast furnaces are currently back in operation at voestalpine.
“The current market situation and the associated input material requirements in the business units of the Metal Engineering Division make it necessary to restart the second blast furnace in Donawitz,” explained the group. The economic uncertainty for the coming months remains high in view of the corona pandemic and the ongoing lockdown measures in numerous countries, the management emphasized.
The group produces its steel products in Austria at two locations and operates a total of five blast furnaces for this purpose – three in Linz, two in Leoben-Donawitz. For Voest, this results in an annual production capacity of 6.5 million pig iron.
The three blast furnaces in the Upper Austrian capital can produce up to 5 million tons of pig iron per year – 60 percent of the capacity is accounted for by the large blast furnace and 20 percent each by the two small units. The Steel Division of voestalpine produces steel products in Linz for all premium automobile manufacturers and their suppliers, for the European household appliance and mechanical engineering as well as the energy industry.
At the headquarters of the Metal Engineering Division of voestalpine in Leoben-Donawitz, Styria, there are two blast furnaces with a capacity of 750,000 tons each, for a total of 1.5 million tons.
Over the summer of 2020, one of the two blast furnaces in Donawitz underwent routine maintenance (“delivery”) and has been idle ever since. The Group's Metal Engineering Division produces steel products at the location, which are processed into special rails, wire rod and heavy-duty oilfield pipes in the Styrian subsidiaries.
The Railway Systems division, with which the Metal Engineering Division of voestalpine claims to be the global market leader for complete railway infrastructure systems, has “developed steadily” even during the Corona economic crisis. Now the areas of wire and seamless tubes, which suffered massively from the corona-related slump in demand in the automotive and oil and gas industries in the past year, will again record a “slightly improved capacity utilization”.
