Steel Mills
No. 8 Blast Furnace Down at US Steel Gary Works
Written by John Packard
June 5, 2014
US Steel has another unplanned outage, this time at their Gary Works facility. The furnace went down on Sunday and is expected to be down for anywhere from three to six weeks according to SMU sources. The furnace, referenced as #8 by US Steel, is the smallest of the four operating furnaces at the Gary Works steelmaking operations. Rated at 3,300 net tons of pig iron per day by AIST the outage has the potential to impact approximately 69,000 tons of pig iron capacity.
A US Steel spokesperson told SMU, “On Sunday, Gary Works had an incident without injury which resulted in a disruption of the operation of the No. 8 blast furnace. Repairs are progressing.”
By Thursday evening we had learned that the “incident” was not as serious as some have thought and the downtown should be much less than the 40 days being projected by some.
Gary Works has four blast furnaces capable of producing 20,500 net tons of pig iron per day when operating at capacity. The mill recently was struggling to operate all of the furnaces due to a lack of raw materials created by heavy ice on Lake Superior and through the Soo Locks. The furnaces were reported to have just recently come back online as shipping conditions improved and it is not known if the raw material issues helped create the incident in question.
US Steel also lost the ability to use their basic oxygen process (BOP) at Great Lakes over an extended period of time due to a damaged roof over top of the vessels. Repairs have been made and that plant is now back up and running.
US Steel has another small blast furnace down for maintenance at their Braddock, PA operations. That furnace is expected to be down for approximately two months for a reline.
John Packard
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