Steel Mills

JSW Plans Fully Integrated Steel Complex at Baytown

March 27, 2018

JSW Steel announced it will invest $500 million in its U.S. plate and pipe operations. The Baytown, Texas, facility will receive $150 million in upgrades and the rest will fund a new hot-end facility to make steel.

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott signed an agreement with the company to provide a grant of $3.4 million. The JSW investment “will go into backward integration and also to create the first melt and manufacture contiguous plates and pipes facility in Texas,” Abbott told reporters at the signing.

Head of U.S. operations Parth Jindal said the investment “reiterates our commitment to stay invested and grow in the U.S. market. It also provides JSW USA an opportunity to participate in the USA’s infrastructure development and job creation priorities.”

He added, “Access to natural gas at extremely economical prices and the abundant availability of scrap steel in Texas make conditions very conducive for manufacturing through the Electric Arc Furnace route. JSW Steel (USA) Inc. wishes to create a world class, fully integrated steel complex that will bring precision manufacturing of high-quality steel plate and pipe to Texas.”

Baytown is running at 30 percent of its 1 million metric ton capacity and sources plate steel from Brazil, Mexico and India. Once the new mill is operational, steel will be sourced from within Texas itself, said Jindal. The first phase of the expansion is expected to be completed by March 2019 and the second phase by October 2020.

Jindal parried questions about whether the decision had to do with the recent Section 232 tariffs. The investment has been in the works for the past 18 months but was delayed by low oil prices, he told the Economic Times,

“Since the prices have recovered to reasonable levels now, we thought of speeding up our plans. The Texas oil and gas industry needs 8 million tons of steel pipes and plates annually of which almost 25 percent are met through imports. This market is what we are trying to capture.”

JSW Group purchased the Baytown facility out of bankruptcy for $810 million in October 2007. The JSW plate division mill rolls hot-rolled plate widths up to 160 inches (4.1m) and thicknesses up to six inches (152.4mm) and services oilfield fabricators, heavy equipment producers, machinery makers, and many other end users and distributors who need high quality carbon plate.

The pipe division mill produces DSAW pipe to service energy and petrochemical markets, including large-diameter line pipe for onshore and offshore use, heavy duty casing and piling.

Note: This article has been modified to show the correct date of purchase of Baytown by JSW Group was 2007.