The UAE’s National Petroleum Construction Company (NPCC) has awarded a contract to India’s Essar Steel for building offshore platforms, the first time that an Indian firm has joined the league of top plate mills of Japan and the European Union as a supplier of special American Petroleum Institute (API) grades for a project of that nature.

Essar Steel secured an order for API grade plates valued at $14 million from the UAE firm. It is the first Indian steel company and only the sixth in the world to get approved for the use of the API monogram on 2H, 2W and 2Y grades of steel plates meant for the hydrocarbon industry.

'This approval will not only help the company serve the domestic market but also open up opportunities to cater to international markets, including the Middle East and Europe,' said Essar Steel which described the order as a 'breakthrough.'

NPCC is the EPC contractor for building offshore platforms for ONGC for B series and N-15 and N-16 -6 wellhead platforms project at offshore Mumbai High Field.

Essar Steel will supply steel plates with width ranging from 2 m to 4 m for N15 and N16 parts of this critical project. It is the only steel mill in India which has developed the API standard high-tensile grades up to 63.5 mm for deep-sea offshore platform applications.

The order, which Essar Steel says is the beginning of new business opportunities, will be executed by the end of July 2011.'This is an unprecedented order for an Indian steel company since this space is traditionally occupied by top plate mills of Japan and the EU,' it said.

Set up at a cost of approximately $446.7 million, the plate mill has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million tonnes. Equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and cutting-edge technology sourced from Siemens Voest Alpine, the mill is the only one of its kind in the country, capable of producing 5-m-wide plates conforming to global standards.

Finishing facilities

The plate mill has unique finishing facilities that include normalised rolled, furnace-normalised, direct quenched, quenched and tempered (QT) plates, shot blasting, austenising and Accelerated Direct Cooling (ADCO). The mill is capable of producing plates with a thickness ranging from 5 to 150 mm, width from 900 to 4900 mm and 3 m to 25 m in length – all of which are import-substitution products.

An Essar Steel plate mill

As a result, it also became the first domestic steel producer to have been acknowledged by agencies of the Union Defence Ministry and successfully won the first order from Mazagon Dock Limited for supplying heavy duty steel plates for the Indian Navy’s war and supply ships.

The company’s plates find applications in diverse segments, including defence, oil and gas, boilers and pressure vessels, heavy duty earth-moving machines, wind towers, mine protective vehicles and construction. The plate mill has approvals from some of the world’s leading shipbuilding firms and manufacturers of boilers and yellow goods.

Essar Steel has now become the country’s only steel plant with integrated facilities for heavy plates, hot rolling, cold rolling, galvanising and colour coating and a full distribution business with steel processing centres and retail outlets under the brand Essar Hypermarts.

A fully integrated flat carbon steel manufacturer with a production capacity of 14 million tonnes per year, it has a presence in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The Indian Navy order requires Essar Steel to supply 13,000 tonnes of heavy plates to build state-of-the-art ships for defence purposes.

With that order, Essar Steel’s plate mill became the first primer plate producer in the country to be recognised for indigenous development of steel for building ships for the Indian Navy. A stringent mill audit of the company’s recently commissioned wide-plate mill was conducted by teams from the Directorate of Naval Architecture, Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory and Director General of Quality Assurance of the Ministry of Defence. This is the first time that Mazagon Dock has placed an order for such a large consignment of steel plates from a domestic steel mill.