Welspun Gujarat Commissions Tubular Steel Pipe Facility in Arkansas

Indian steel-pipe manufacturer Welspun Gujarat Stahl Rohren Limited (WGSRL) (Bharuch, Gujarat) recently commissioned an API-certified state-of-the-art tubular steel pipe mill in Little Rock, AK.

According to a report by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, TX), the new $150 million facility is spread over 740 acres of land, and the pipe mill has the capacity to produce 300,000 tons of helically submerged arc-welded pipes. The facility is designed to produce pipes with outer diameters ranging from 24 to 60 inches and wall thickness of 6 to 25 millimeters. The facility had earlier commissioned a coating and double-jointing unit and has already proved to be a "one-stop solution" for its customers.

The company recently received fresh orders worth about $97 million for the supply of steel plates. At present, the company's order book for the supply of both steel plates and pipes stands at about $1.8 billion.

WGSRL is the flagship company of the Welspun Group and has supplied pipes for projects in a variety of terrains, including the Rockies Project in the very tough mountainous terrains of the U.S. and the Independence Trail Project in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico. The company has two state-of-the-art facilities in Anjar and Dahej, both in Gujarat. The Anjar plate mill is currently under a shut-down period of 45 days in order to facilitate the integration of a new coil mill to the facility. This 1.5 million-ton-per-year plate and coil mill is one of only three such mills in the world. The facility has the capacity to produce plates of up to 4.5 meters in diameter and 140 millimeters in thickness and coils of up to 2.8 meters in width, 25 millimeters in thickness, and 120,000 pounds per square inch in strength. The new setup will enable WGSRL to improve its flexibility to manufacture high-grade coils internally to meet critical orders. The company will now be able to cater to high-end specialized product requirements of the shipping industry, the line pipe industry (API grades), bridges and other heavy construction. The plant will also be able to fulfill orders for boiler plates and wind blades. This is part of the company's backward integration project.

WGSRL is the world's second-largest producer of large-diameter steel pipes. At the Economic Times Corporate Excellence Awards of 2008, the firm won the "Emerging Company of the Year" award. Set up in 1995 by Bal Krishna Goenka, WGSRL manufactures a wide range of pipes used mostly in the oil and gas industry. The company's plants are strategically located near the western ports of Gujarat as most of the company's orders come from overseas clients.

www.welspunpipes.com