JSW Steel USA Restarting Ohio Sheet Mill EAF, Caster

“Our sales team has done an outstanding job selling out our March and April tons,” Bush said. “We are looking forward to re-entering the market and getting material to our valued customers.”

Bush did not specify a date for Mingo Junction’s hot-strip mill restarting or what the company’s sales mix would be.

But, he added, “in addition to producing slabs for HRC, a large part of our slab production from the Mingo Junction facility will ship to our Baytown facility to be rolled into plate.”

JSW Steel USA idled its Mingo Junction and Baytown mills in 2020 in response to poor market demand following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It used the downtime to make upgrades to the Ohio mill’s EAF and caster.

The company makes slab, hot-rolled coil, plate and pipe. The Mingo Junction mill melts and casts slabs. It converts some of those slabs into hot-rolled coil.

The Baytown mill does not have melt capability. It depends on slabs from its sister mill in Ohio or from abroad. Those slabs are rolled into plate, some of which is sold to third parties and some of which is used to feed Baytown’s large-diameter pipe mill.

The restart of the Mingo Junction EAF also means that JSW Steel USA will be able to offer material that is melted and poured in the United States, a key designation for certain publicly funded infrastructure work.

“We continue towards our path to become a premier, ‘melted and manufactured’ in the USA, plate, HRC and pipe producer,” Bush said.

The planned restart of melting and casting at Mingo Junction and pipe making at Baytown comes after JSW Steel USA in late February restarted the plate mill at its Texas location.

The Mingo Junction mill’s EAF has annual capacity of 1.5 million tons, according to the Association for Iron & Steel Technology’s 2021 Directory of Iron and Steel Plants.

And the furnace is coming back online during one of the strongest steel markets on record.

SMU’s benchmark hot-rolled coil price stands at $1,240 per ton, up 7.8% from $1,150 per ton a month ago and up 25.9% from $985 per ton at the beginning of the year.

Hot-rolled coil has not held above $1,000 per ton for this long since 2008, when hot-rolled coil prices topped out at $1,070 in July, before the financial crisis.

That figure, adjusted for inflation, is $1,272.45 per ton, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com