Steel Mills

Nucor Confirms Plan to Add Coating Lines to Indiana Mill

Written by David Schollaert

February 1, 2022

Nucor Corp. today announced plans to invest $290 million to upgrade its Crawfordsville, Ind., steel sheet mill. The Charlotte, N.C.-based steelmaker will expand the mill’s product capabilities by adding a 300,000 tons per year (tpy) construction-grade continuous galvanizing line and a 250,000 tpy prepaint line, the company said. The project, which company executives alluded to during their quarterly conference call last week, will take two years to complete.

Nucor“Investing in Nucor Steel Indiana will allow us to grow our profitability in the Midwest construction region and expand Nucor’s prepaint footprint,” said Rex Query, Nucor’s Executive VP of Sheet and Tubular Products. “This investment is part of our strategy to grow our core steel businesses and expand our portfolio of value-added products.”

This latest investment in a string of recent moves by the largest domestic steelmaker will further expand its existing galvanizing and prepaint capabilities, supplementing the recently added continuous galvanizing lines at its sheet mills in Arkansas and Kentucky and the prepaint line at its Arkansas sheet mill.

Nucor Steel Indiana was the steelmaker’s first steel sheet mill, starting operations in 1989 and pioneering electric arc furnace (EAF) thin-slab casting. Over the three-plus decades since, Nucor has continued to invest in advanced sheet steel products and technologies. It currently operates five sheet mills that utilize thin slab casters, and recently added a sixth mill, a majority-owned joint venture in California.

This past September, Nucor announced its plan to build a seventh sheet mill, an ultramodern, 3 million tpy EAF mill in Mason County, W.Va., to serve the country’s largest steel consuming regions in the Midwest and the Northeast.

By David Schollaert, David@SteelMarketUpdate.com

 

David Schollaert

David Schollaert is a senior analyst for Steel Market Update. David joined SMU after more than a decade in the metals and mining industry in a myriad of different roles. Much of his early experience and expertise were within the coverage and analysis of steel-making raw materials and served previously as senior editor of the CRU Prices Service. Most recently, however, before his return to market analysis, David held roles as a metals buyer and an operations manager for raw material suppliers. Based in CRU’s Pittsburgh office, David can be reached at david@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-720-1008.

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