Metal production in Ukraine

Ore mining exceeds the demands of domestic steel mills, but export potential is weakened by high extraction costs.

[6] The Ukrainian iron and steel industry is concentrated in central (Kryvyi Rih), southern (Zaporizhia, Nikopol) and eastern (Dnipro, Donets Basin, Mariupol) regions of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian steel industry has been privatized since the 1990s but the coal mines are still owned by the government and experience chronic financial problems.

During the Iron Age, there were several influences on metallurgy: the Dacians, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, among other nomadic peoples.

In 1868, the Millwall Iron Works Company received an order from the Imperial Russian Government for the plating of a naval fortress being built at Kronstadt on the Baltic Sea.

He sailed with eight ships, with not only all the equipment necessary to establish a metal works, but also much of the skilled labour; a group of about a hundred ironworkers and miners mostly from South Wales.

He immediately started to build metal works close to the river Kalmius, at a site near the village of Alexandrovka.

The state-of-the-art works had eight blast furnaces and was capable of a full production cycle, with the first pig iron cast in 1872.

During the 1870s, collieries and iron ore mines were sunk, and brickworks and other facilities were established to make the isolated works a self-sufficient industrial complex.

The land around the metal works quickly grew to become an industrial and cultural centre in the region; the population of the city founded by Hughes now exceeds 1 million.

Over the next twenty years, the works prospered and expanded, first under John Hughes and then, after his death in 1889, under the management of four of his sons.

[7] Labor productivity in the Ukrainian coal industry is three to eight times lower than in Russia, Central Europe and the United States.

[13] Ukraine also possesses substantial reserves of scandium (as a byproduct of iron ore processing),[14] titanium (as both ilmenite and rutile),[15] zirconium[16] and mercury.

Only a fraction of it is processed domestically,[5] with a fairly constant production of 0.11 million tonnes of primary aluminium (2003–2007),[8] or 0.3% of global output.