London 29/09/2016 - Severe storms in South Australia on Wednesday resulted in a state-wide power loss causing an outage of Nyrstar’s entire Port Pirie smelter including the blast furnace, the company said on Thursday.
It is expected that the blast furnace will be down for approximately 10 - 14 days for repairs, negatively impacting metals processing EBITDA by approximately 3 - 5 million euros.
A back-up diesel generator at the Nyrstar Port Pirie site sustained the blast furnace for several hours after the power outage commenced. But, as the power outage continued for a prolonged period, the slag in the blast furnace solidified and the blast furnace could not be tapped
"We are obviously very disappointed that the power supply in South Australia has failed and the impact that this has caused to the Port Pirie plant. The Port Pirie site is working incredibly hard to ensure we are in a position to restore the blast furnace to full functionality as soon as full power is restored. No other plant damage has occurred and the outage is not expected to have any impact to the Port Pirie redevelopment schedule," Bill Scotting, CEO, said.
The lead price rallied on the news, pushing it to the highest since May 14, 2015 at $2,023 per tonne. It was last at $2,013 and up $16. Nearby spreads have tightened with the benchmark cash/threes at a backwardation of $2.25, cash/Oct at $7 and ‘Tom’/Next at $2.