Tata Steel to invest in new slitting line at Hartlepool tube mill

Tata Steel will invest GBP7 million ($8.79 million) in a new slitting line at its Hartlepool tube mill, the UK’s largest steel producer said on June 8.

The new slitter will allow the site to process coils of steel delivered from its Port Talbot steelmaking site. At the moment, wide steel slabs are slit in Port Talbot before being rolled and sent to Hartlepool to be turned into steel tubes.

The tubes are used for agricultural machinery, sports stadiums, steel-framed buildings and the energy sector.

The investment at the Hartlepool site, where almost 300 people work producing up to 200,000 mt of steel tubes a year, is expected to pay for itself in less than three years, with the project expected to take more than a year to be completed. The new slitter will allow the Hartlepool site to improve capacity, cut CO2 emissions and reduce costs.

Tata Steel aims to produce net-zero steel by 2050 in the UK at the latest and to have reduced CO2 emissions by 30% by 2030.

The vast majority of that work will happen at Port Talbot. Tata Steel UK has a designed steelmaking capacity of 5 million mt/year, and it produces around 3.5 million mt/year. It employs around 8,000 people in the UK, half of which are at Port Talbot.

Platts assessed HRC in Northern Europe at Eur950/mt ex-works Ruhr on June 7, stable day on day.

— Annalisa Villa