NINL commissions steel making facility at Kalinganagar

After a decade long wait, Neelachal Ispat Nigam Limited (NINL), a joint venture company of MMTC and the Odisha government, has finally achieved steel making capabilities, making it only the second public sector steel unit in the state, after the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) set up in the sixties.

Though NINL had gone into production at its Kalinganagar plant in 2002, it was only making pig iron till date.

"NINL commissioned its fully automated BOF shop and continuous casting plant on 31st Mar'13," said S P Patnaik, managing director of the company. With production of steel billet now NINL has become a full-fledged integrated steel plant, he added.

The technology for the steel shop was supplied by SMS-Siemag, Germany and SMS-Concast, the world leader in steel melting technology. Besides, a host of Indian companies such as HEC, Ranchi, BHEL-Bangalore and MECON were also involved in the project.

NINL had earlier commissioned the oxygen plant with the help of LINDE, Germany.

The company had initiated steps to set up a steel melting shop, as a part of its second phase expansion, back in 2007 with an investment of Rs 1,600 crore. Following the commissioning of the project, the company said, it can achieve its fully rated capacity of 1.1 million tonne. The new product mix will comprise of billet and pig iron with billets taking up the lion's share of about 0.9 million tonne.

"In future, we have plans to put up a rolling mill to produce bars and rods," said Patnaik.

Earlier, due to low demand for pig iron, the company had restricted its hot metal production to 0.7 to 0.8 million tonne. "With operational discipline at SMS, the company can be a low cost producer of steel very soon, thereby can meet the demand of domestic as well as export market," said P K Mishra, Jt. Managing Director, NINL

"The production of value added product like billet as compared to pig iron, gives much better sales realisations and so, company's financial performance is expected to improve in future days. In India and as well as in world, steel billet demand is much higher than pig iron," said S P Padhi, Director (Finance).

NINL has MoU with its promoter company, MMTC for marketing of its all products including billets and pig iron.