Steel Mills

Cliffs Restarts Middletown Blast Furnace

Written by Michael Cowden

March 31, 2021

Cleveland-Cliffs has restarted the blast furnace at its Middletown Works in Ohio, a company spokeswoman said. The Middletown furnace returned to operation over the weekend after two weeks of preventative maintenance.

cliffs natural resources“As in all planned outages of this nature, ahead of the stoppage we positioned our work-in-process and finished goods inventory in proper shape. By doing so we were, and always will be, able to keep our shipments unaffected,” the spokeswoman said.

Cliffs’s Middletown Works has one furnace, the No. 3. The company in January said that it would take the Middletown furnace down for maintenance after announcing that it was restarting the No. 6 furnace, which had previously been idle, at its Cleveland Works.

The company said at the time that the move was part of a broader strategy of rotating furnaces on and off as necessary to perform maintenance while at the same time keeping output steady.

Cliffs President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said during a quarterly earnings conference call in February that the No. 7 blast furnace at its Indiana Harbor steel mill in East Chicago, Ind., would be the next to go down for maintenance.

The steelmaker has 10 blast furnaces and plans to keep between six and eight operating. “At any given time, we will probably have some maintenance to perform,” Goncalves said.

Middletown Works makes hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated flat-rolled steel as does Indiana Harbor.

The No. 3 furnace at Middletown has daily capacity of 6,500 tons, according to Steel Market Update’s blast furnace status tool. The No. 7 at Indiana Harbor, the largest in North America, has daily capacity of 11,500 tons.

The spokeswoman did not comment on the timeline and scope of any potential repairs to the No. 7 furnace.

“That’s why we have not entertained these questions about the details involved in these repairs; they do not affect our clients, and therefore Cleveland-Cliffs does not share the details,” she said.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com

Michael Cowden

Michael Cowden is managing editor for Steel Market Update. Cowden has covered the steel industry since 2007. He specializes in flat-rolled steel but has also reported on steel long products, steel pipe and tube, and aluminum. Before joining SMU, Cowden held reporting jobs at Fastmarkets AMM in Chicago, the Associated Press in Pittsburgh, and the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. He has also worked as a copy editor and in marketing at the University of Chicago Press. Cowden has a BA in English from the University of Chicago and an MSJ journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Contact him at michael@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-759-7872.

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