Press Metal gears up to full production after last year's power outage

Press Metal Bhd’s Mukah aluminium smelter will return to full production by April, almost nine months after it suffered catastrophic damage during the six-hour statewide power outage in mid last year.

Group chief executive officer Datuk Koon Poh Keong (pic) said the plant was in total shut-down for four months, and repairs took another four months.

“We’ve managed to recover. Right now we are almost back to 100% production capacity,” Koon told reporters at the factory here, which has a production capacity of 120,000 tonnes per annum.

The factory, which began operations five years ago, was one of the first such plants in South East Asia. The mammoth facility (its main production house is 750m in length) consumes about 200MW of electricity, and was in the middle of the smelting process when the electricity cut occurred on June 27 last year.

The outage led to a significant drop in temperature of its production pots, causing metals to solidify, which “bricked” all the pots.

According to reports then, none of Press Metal Mukah’s more than 200 pots were salvageable.

Koon described the incident as a “setback” that was tough on the company, in which it “suffered humongous loss”.

“We hope this is not something that would ever happen again. On our part, I’m glad that our good team stuck together. Not one person left our company (during the stoppage and repairs),” Koon said.

Asked further, the chief executive conceded the power outage caused investor-client loss of confidence.

“When you supply hardware, then you stop suddenly, even though the cause was external, their (client’s) view is whether you can (continue to) support them or not. Investors also became worried.

“We had to prove to everyone, even though we suffered a big setback, we are able to get back.”

On a related matter, asked what assurance the Federal and state governments had given on the prevention of a similar blackout — the second and last statewide outage occurred in August 2008 — Koon said “many meetings” had been held between public and private sectors.

Koon said as far as he was aware “the situation is being investigated”.

“Those meetings were to address all possibilities. But the fact remains Sarawak is blessed with a lot of energy resources.

“Also, power outages can happen anywhere in the world.”

The chief executive said Press Metal had put in place better mitigation processes. He also said should the state government enhance its power generation capabilities, Press Metal was interested to expand.

Aside from this plant, the company also has a Samalaju smelter, which is 2.6 times bigger than the Mukah plant. The Samalaju smelter is estimated to consume 500MW at full production capacity, and with an output of 320,000 tonnes per annum.

Koon rated the power outage as one of the biggest challenges in the company’s five years of operation.