26 | Focus on OSB: Rest of the World
while wood shredding, drying units and an energy plant are also investments. The OSB plant is not the only investment for Swiss Krono at Vásárosnamény. It has announced plans to build a plywood plant there – effectively a new product for the group in a move which will create 90 jobs. The new plant worth €23.7m will have a 17,000m3 2024-2025.
capacity and for completion in It just remains to mention Swiss Krono’s
Polish plant at Zary, which likes its other OSB plants has seen an expansion project, with capacity expected to increase by about 100,000m3
to 500,000m3 .
Looking further afield into Eastern Europe, some of the OSB projects known by WBPI – particularly in Russia – have been harder to garner information for since the start of the Ukraine conflict, with Western equipment suppliers now not currently engaged in the country.
The most recent Russian project confirmed
as completed was in 2022 – the Monolit- Story OSB mill (Latat brand) in Tomsk. IMAL- PAL Group supplied the complete OSB line – featuring a continuous 2.65m x 30m press – with a 250,000m3
annual capacity.
It’s possible some of the other mooted Russian projects have been shelved, but for now we are keeping some of these on the list of potential future capacity in the expectation there will be either confirmation of progress or cancellation. These include Sibboard in Seversk; Mega Smart in Bashkortostan; Angara Les LLC, Karat Group in Krasnoyarsk; and a small plant in Vologda. Mega Smart, a producer of furniture from particleboard and MDF from Kazakhstan, is believed to be targeting a 231,000 m³ capacity plant. The tentative investment value is estimated at €100-120m on a land area of 25ha in Sibay. However, Kronospan’s OSB mill project at Rivne in Western Ukraine has progressed and
REST OF THE WORLD There continues to be activity on the OSB investment front in China and southeast Asia. Some of this is focused on hybrid products where an OSB core layer is faced with layers of PB.
Recent announcements include two of these so-called Fine OSB plants completed by Dieffenbacher at the Luli Group in China. The German technology company said the projects in Jiangxi and Hunan were completed in December 2023 and January 2024 respectively.
These are Luli’s third and fourth Fine OSB plants from Dieffenbacher. The company’s first Dieffenbacher plant went into operation in August 2015 in Shouguang, Shandong, and the second in June 2021 at the same site. The latest plants are believed to have
approximate production capacities of 600,000m3
, with 8.5ft x 64m press sizes. Despite hybrid boards being difficult to
categorise for capacity purposes, we will add the Jiangxi product to the main listing and the Hunan line to the future capacity list in 2024.
Chinese wood-based panel producer A Beautiful Family Plate Making Co Ltd (BFP) saw its new Fine OSB plant in Guangxi (from Dieffenbacher) produce its first board in the autumn, 2023. The CPS+ continuous press system has an annual production capacity of 500,000m3
.
project architects AMBK has been posting photos of the building work. A PB line was already completed at the same site, which is situated in the west of the country and largely away from the war zone. The OSB mill is projected to have a very large capacity but the Ukraine conflict has caused issues for the panel industry in the country. We expect this project to be added to the main listing next year.
This has been added to the main listing. Siempelkamp recorded an order in Q1, 2024 from a Chinese customer who plans to produce hybrid panels consisting of an OSB core and PB surfaces. More details on the producer will be forthcoming later. From all these orders it is quite clear that
hybrid panel products with an OSB core are very popular in the region, due to the product’s good mechanical properties and surface quality. WBPI is aware of several other potential
Fine OSB / OSB projects in the Asia/Asia Pacific region and await specific details. And it’s not just China that is interested
in hybrid panels. Dieffenbacher received an order late last year from New Zealand’s Fletcher Building Limited for a complete CEBRO plant for the production of Fine OSB. The plant will be built at Fletcher Building’s Laminex site in Taupo, in the centre of the country’s North Island. In Fletcher Building’s efforts to support New Zealand’s goal of a low-carbon circular economy, the new plant will include Dieffenbacher’s new, highly sustainable Belt Dryer.
The new CEBRO plant will have the flexibility to produce Fine OSB and conventional OSB. It will replace a particleboard production line featuring an almost 50-year-old single-opening press supplied by Dieffenbacher in 1974. Meanwhile, IMAL PAL GROUP signalled last year it was expecting to supply a complete OSB line with a 30m continuous press to a customer in Vietnam.
The capacity will be 250,000m3 / year. This
line, for a customer new to the wood-based panels business, is projected to be delivered in 2024 and be commissioned in 2025. Last, but not least Paneles Arauco has a project in Cholguán, Chile with an expected capacity of 400,000m3 in 2025. ●
and start-up
Above left: West Fraser’s Inverness OSB plant, part of its European operations which is seeing OSB perform better than MDF and PB in early 2024 Above right: Fletcher and Dieffenbacher discussions on site for the new Fine OSB plant in Taupo
WBPI | April/May 2024 |
www.wbpionline.com
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