POSCO says 'business as usual' after Pohang fire

South Korean steelmaker POSCO says production at its Pohang Works on the country's southeast coast will not be affected by a spectacular fire that erupted early on Sunday morning at the works' No.3 FINEX plant that seriously injured one worker.

The No. 3 FINEX plant has been shut down while local fire and police investigate the cause, but POSCO says production will not be affected.

"We expect no setbacks in scheduled production, as we can make up the production in our three blast furnaces in the Pohang factory," Korea's Yonhap news agency quotes a POSCO spokesperson as saying. However, complete restoration will likely require a week, the company said.

The fire broke out in the tower of the FINEX plant at around 4.20 am and burned for five hours. Local residents said they heard three loud explosions that shook the building.

The FINEX process, developed by POSCO, uses untreated fine iron ore and non-coking coal to produce a hot metal identical in composition to pig iron produced using a conventional blast furnace, but with lower input costs and lower emissions, as Mysteel Global has reported. POSCO commissioned a 600,000 mt/y pilot plant at the Pohang works in June 2003, started its first commercial scale unit of 1.5 million mt/y capacity in 2007 and the second – the No.3 – in 2014.

The No. 3 plant has 2 million t/y capacity and accounts for 10% of total molten iron production available at the mill, Korean media reports say. Besides the two FINEX plants with their 3.5 million t/y capacity, the Pohang works has three blast furnaces with a production capacity totalling 12 million t/y.

"Due to the decline in global demand for steel products, there is room for (lifting) existing blast furnace operating rates," the JoongAhn Ilbo quotes a company official says say.

The daily had led its report by ruefully noting that "another blaze" had broken out in Pohang, reporting that a series of explosions and fires had occurred at the Pohang Works recently causing growing anxiety among local citizens.

A fire broke out in communication facilities on January 26 this year, another at a coal transport facility on February 15 and another a few weeks later, on a raw materials conveyor. There was also one near the No.2 blast furnace last December.

The incidents have been small and caused no fatalities or seriously disrupted production, but the Pohang Works does seem cursed with ill luck.

In September 2022, torrential rains associated with Typhoon Hinnamnor flooded the Pohang Works and forced POSCO to halt operations there for the first time in its 49-year history, as reported. It took more than three months for the works to be fully operational again. At the time, the Pohang plant produced some 16.9 million t/y of finished steel and accounted for 24% of parent company Posco Holdings' total sales.

Written by Russ McCulloch, russ.mcculloch@mysteel.com

Edited by Alyssa Ren, rentingting@mysteel.com