Steel Mills

SDI Columbus EAF Down ~10 Days on Unplanned Outage

Written by Michael Cowden

June 24, 2021

Steel Dynamics Inc. (SDI) is making repairs after an unplanned outage at an electric-arc furnace (EAF) at its flat-rolled steel mill in Columbus, Miss., according the company’s top executive.

The outage, which occurred last weekend, is expected to result in approximately 10 days of lost production, or about 25,000-30,000 tons of hot metal, SDI President and CEO Mark Millett said in an email to Steel Market Update.

SDI

The incident happened when hot metal burned through one of the mill’s two EAFs. “There was no explosion, but a large amount of molten metal poured into the slag pit. There were no injuries,” he said.

Radiant heat also burned some wiring on the No. 1 furnace and resulted in it being down for approximately 10-12 hours, he said.

SDI has two EAFS at the Columbus mill with a combined annual capacity of 3.1 million tons per year, according to the Association for Iron & Steel Technology’s 2021 Directory of Iron and Steel Plants.

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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