From the category archives:

Raw Materials

Vertical integration into scrap – lessons from iron ore

March 26, 2008

There has been a recent flurry of steel producer acquisitions of scrap processors (SDI-Omnisource,  Nucor- DJ Joseph, DJ Joseph-MRS, Galamba) and persistent rumors that others are circling targets. By my calculations steel producers now control about 40% of the US ferrous scrap industry. They controlled less than half that only a few years ago. If […]

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Iron ore statistics and commodity pricing

March 12, 2008

A good source of iron ore statistics are reports published by the UNCTAD secretariat (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in cooperation with the Raw Materials Group, based in Sweden. You can view all the available publications on the Raw Materials Group website, but you can read the full World Investment Report 2007 by […]

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2008 iron ore prices to increase by 65%

February 18, 2008

CVRD, the largest producer of iron ore in the world, has just reached an agreement with some of the major Asian steel producers  to increase 2008 benchmark iron ore prices by 65%  to 71%.   A typical integrated steel maker uses roughly 1.4 short tons of iron ore pellets to produce a short ton of hot […]

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Scrap supply from Russia to decline further

January 23, 2008

This is a very interesting presentation from Russian mining & metallurgical company Metalloinvest from September 2007. It provides some good data on Russian steel output through 2015 along with changing raw material use and sources as the Russian economy and particularly the steelmaking portion expand. This is especially important as the withdrawal of Russian scrap supply from […]

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DJ Joseph Scrap Recap

January 7, 2008

DJ Joseph puts together a handy summary every month of various data related to ferrous scrap and steel. You can find it on the company’s website under the menu “Industry” and option Scrap Recap. They have monthly data going back to 1997.

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Scrap consumption calculations

December 13, 2007

This file – Scrap use Calculations – is a little old, but it’s from the Steel Recycling Institute and offers one way of calculating both scrap use and recycled content in steelmaking by both EAF and BOF routes. There are good explanations of scrap terms particularly home, prompt etc.  

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