Steel Mills

U.S. Steel Slates March Maintenance Outage on Granite City B Furnace

Written by Michael Cowden

January 7, 2022

U.S. Steel plans to take a nearly month-long maintenance outage in March on the B blast furnace at its Granite City Works near St. Louis, a company spokeswoman confirmed.

The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker is targeting March 3-28 for the planned outage, she said.

US Steel“We do not anticipate customer impact,” the spokeswoman added.

Planned outages typically don’t impact customers because mills can build slab inventories ahead of them. Unplanned outages are the ones that can disrupt customers.

Granite City has two blast furnaces, A and B. The A furnace has been indefinitely idled since April 2020. The B furnace has daily capacity of 3,600 tons, according to SMU’s blast furnace status table.

The last round of maintenance on the B furnace was in October 2021, when U.S. Steel took a seven-day planned outage.

The additional work on Granite City also comes after the company last year completed two outages at its Gary Works in northwest Indiana: a 38-day outage on the No. 6 blast furnace and a 10-day outage on the larger No. 14 furnace.

SMU has updated its blast furnace status table to reflect all of the above developments.

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 has since 2014 specialized in flat-rolled steel but has previously reported on steel long products, steel pipe and tube as well as aluminum. Before joining SMU, Cowden held reporting jobs at Fastmarkets AMM in Chicago - where he was involved in launching AMM's daily hot-rolled coil index, 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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