Vale forecasts 360 million-380m tonnes of iron ore production, including third-party purchases, in 2017, rising to 400m-420mt in 2018, 400m-430mt in 2019 and 400m-450mt in 2020, according to Guilherme Reinisch Neves, Vale’s Chief Commercial Officer MENA, India and SE Asia.

Vale’s offshore blending capacity will double on-year in 2017 to 80m-90m tonnes/year, while the share of offshore in total iron ore inventories will rise 10 percentage points to 35%. Fewer final product will be formed in Brazilian ports, and more will be formed closer to customers in distribution centres or Chinese ports.

“The offshore blending allows Vale to ship intermediate products from Brazil, thus eliminating the need for each system to produce a final saleable product,” Neves says in a presentation sent to Kallanish.

The Brazilian miner officially inaugurated its S11D iron ore project on 16 December, with commercial operations scheduled for start-up in January (see Kallanish 19 December).

Vale’s Oman-based iron ore pelletising plant has produced over 41mt of pellet since its commissioning. In October 2016 it achieved a new monthly production record of 874,000t, which would be 10.5mt on an annualized basis, above the plant’s design capacity of 9m t/y. The plant can supply DR-grade pellet to Abu Dhabi in one day, Jubail in 1.7 days, Mumbai in 4.8 days, Ain Sokhna in 8.6 days and Malaysia in 12.7 days.