China’s Tangshan City Orders New Production Cuts from 8 January 2018

SteelMint has heard from its sources that, North China's Tangshan, the country's largest steel-producing city has launched ‘Level II Emergency Response to Heavy Pollution Weather’.

Considering the overall weather conditions that have become relatively poor over past few days and is forecasted to worsen further in the coming days the Tangshan government has decided to initiate to Level II Emergency Response under which steel mills are ordered to curb their production from 8 Jan-14 Jan’18 and is subject to further extension.

The steel mills are divided under three categories A, B, and C based on their emission level. Under Class A, those mills that have their plants outside the urban are ordered to close down 30% of their sintering units and mills that are within the urban area are ordered to have 40% of the output curb. Steel units under Class B are ordered to shut down 50% of their sintering units, under Class C mills have to shut down 60% of their capacities and under Class D, steel mills must have their sintering units completely stopped.

Tangshan had imposed restrictions on blast furnace output during winter heating season from Nov’18-Mar’19 to control emissions. Mills were divided into four categories with restrictions ranging from 0-80pc depending on the emissions intensity.

In Dec’18, the city government has named some mills that were not fully compliant with these restrictions and warned them to follow the restrictions notice to the letter. Some mills had damped blast furnaces instead of completely shutting down.

Due to the anti-pollution measures that are strictly being followed especially since the past two years, Tangshan city was able to achieve sizeable pollution and steel capacity cuts in 2018. The average concentration of lung-damaging particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) concentration in Tangshan jumped 8.66% y-o-y basis in 2018. In fact, in 2018, the city successfully reduced 5.02 MnT of crude steel capacity and 2.98 MnT of pig iron capacity

source: SteelMint