Germany's Aurubis copper smelter back from maintenance

Germany's Aurubis today announced that its Hamburg copper smelter returned to service on 11 July from the largest maintenance shutdown in the company's history that began 7 May.

A restart is now under way following the €95mn 60-day maintenance that included an overhaul of the flash smelter, installation of heat exchangers in the contact acid plant, as well as the installation of a tap hold drill and tamping machine for improved safety of copper slag tapping. Hydrogen-ready anode furnaces were also installed as measures to improve sustainability.

Investments in automation are set to improve efficiency and extend the frequency of planned maintenance rounds to three years from two.

The Hamburg smelter's outage has exacerbated sulphuric acid tightness in Europe, and the operational restart is expected to provide some relief to the market. This comes in addition to the lack of availability of molten sulphur in the region, leading to shortages of sulphur burnt acid, which has prompted some consumers to replace burnt acid with smelter acid, lifting demand.

Aurubis produced 1.19mn t of sulphuric acid during the first six months of the 2023-24 financial year (October-March), up by 1pc on the same period a year earlier. Output at Aurubis' Hamburg smelter rose by 11pc to 512,000t in the period, while output from the Pirdop smelter saw a 6pc decline on the period to 679,000t.

For the first three months of the year, Aurubis produced 598,000t of acid, unchanged from the same quarter of 2022-23, as increased output at its Hamburg smelter offset a decline from Bulgaria's Pirdop plant. Production at Hamburg totalled 258,000t from January-March.

By Maria Mosquera