To deal with China’s domestic environmental restraints and raw materials bottleneck, some Chinese steelmakers have been expanding their coke capacity in Indonesia. Two new projects were kicked off in early September, bringing the coke capacity owned by Chinese investors in Indonesia to over 15 Mt/a.

          On 1 September, the construction work of Detian Coke (4.7 Mt/a) kicked off. Detian Coke is a joint venture between three Chinese companies. New Tianjin Steel, a core part of private steelmaker Delong Group, owns a majority stake (52%) in the project while the world’s largest stainless steelmaker Tsingshan Holdings and Xuyang Coke have a minority stake, respectively. Xuyang Coke is a leading Chinese coke producer (12.0 Mt/a) with its major operation in Hebei province. The coke plant is located in an industrial park built by Tsingshan Holdings in Morowali County of Sulawesi Province, East Indonesia. The capacity will be expanded to 10.0 Mt/a in a second phase.

          It was reported in early September that Nanjing Steel has decided to build a 3.9 Mt/a coke plant in the same industrial park built by Tsingshan Holdings in Indonesia. The project is a joint venture between Tsingshan Holdings, Xuyang Coke and China’s largest private steelmaker Shagang Group. Construction work is expected to begin in early November 2021 and to be operational in August 2022.

This is Nanjing Steel’s second coke project in Indonesia. In December 2020, Nanjing Steel announced the start of the construction work of a 2.6 Mt/a coke plant in the same industrial park (see Issue 165 of this report). The two projects have a combined coke capacity of 6.5 Mt/a.

           China is the largest coking coal and coke producer in the world. Approximately 90% of China’s coking coal is domestically produced, and the remaining 10% is imported from Australia, Mongolia, Russia, Canada, etc. Australia used to be China’s largest source of imports, but since December 2020 the Chinese government has stopped trading with Australia.

---worldsteel