Originally Posted by
sawmilleng
FL,
I think you are overestimating the amount of steel in a coal generation plant. Patriot said that the estimate for his plant was around 10,000 tons, which is pretty small potatos in the yearly North America steel capacity of around 100 million tons. And the world steel capacity of 10 times that.
The demolition should be just good steady business.
Jon.
Well, I confess that I didn't do my own quantitative analysis -- I just had a little google time after work! ;-)
I relied on secondary sources -- and your point is very well taken, because I really haven't seen anything that estimates the actual volume of scrap these plant closures are likely to yield. I don't even have a gut feeling for how much it would be.
I gather that the greatest share of it will be ferrous scrap. Is that correct? I suspect it would be hard to come up with an approx. "average" yield per generator without knowing anything about the equipment in each plant, because there's a lot of variation in capacity (hence size), design, etc. So how would someone go about doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the volume of scrap that would result from the dismantling of
x plants per year? I guess someone who knows the industry very well could come up with a reasonable guesstimate.
Hmm. I also don't know the volume of scrap metal currently produced annually in the US. It would be useful to be able to estimate the % increase in annual scrap volume that's likely to occur. Do the yards set their own
scrap prices, or do they basically take the prices dictated by the global metals markets?
Ugh, this scrapping thing is getting all macroeconomic on me.... I think it's time for me to go watch something stupid on TV!!
Bookmarks