Konecranes said Tuesday that it has been awarded a contract to supply all of the cranes for TPCO America Corporation's new seamless steel pipe mill facility near Gregory, Texas. The order includes 24 cranes for the melt shop, rolling mill and finishing mill.The crane delivery will begin in October of 2013, and will be operational by April 2014.
According to Tianjin Pipe Corporation (TPCO), this project represents the largest single investment by a Chinese company in a US manufacturing facility to date. TPCO will invest more than US$1 billion through its subsidiary TPCO America (with US-joint venture partners) to build the new facility on a 253-acre greenfield site east of Gregory, Texas near Corpus Christi. Output for the project is estimated at 500,000 metric tons of seamless pipe per year. When completed, the plant will employ 600-800 Texas workers.
Konecranes will supply seven custom engineered cranes, including two hot metal ladle cranes, a tundish crane, two magnet scrap handling cranes and two magnet billet cranes to the melt shop, ranging in capacity from 40 to 180 tons, all rated CMAA class E or F. The melt shop will also be serviced by two smaller CXT maintenance cranes.
The rolling mill will include 10 cranes ranging in capacity from 20 to 50 tons. The cranes will be used for pipe and billet handling and for mill maintenance.
For the finishing mill, Konecranes will supply three CMAA class F, 25-ton pipe handling cranes. The cranes will be used in the pipe finishing and threading operations. At the end of this process, two 30-ton CMAA Class E, semi-gantry magnet cranes will store finished pipe in the yard and load it into railcars.