Steel Mills

NLMK USA Slates Oct-Nov Outage at Indiana Sheet Mill
Written by Michael Cowden
September 21, 2022
NLMK USA has planned a roughly month-long outage for upgrades to its electric-arc furnace (EAF) sheet mill in Portage, Ind.
The work is scheduled for October and November and will be focused on enhancements to the plant’s melt shop and hot strip mill, a company spokesman said.
NLMK USA in emails to customers specified the dates as Oct. 24 through the week of Nov. 20.
“Our contract customers and regular spot buyers are covered throughout these outages,” the spokesman said, noting that the work was planned and scheduled well in advance.
Work on the melt shop will be aimed at improving its reliability. The outage on the hot strip mill is to implement a new automated gauge control (AGC) system, he said.
“That will enable us to hold quarter standard ASTM tolerances throughout our full range of products at Indiana,” the spokesman said.
NLMK USA operates an EAF steel mill in Portage, Ind., a hot strip mill and cold reduction mill in Farrell, Pa., and a galvanizing facility in Sharon, Pa. The Portage mill has a capacity of 800,000 tons per year.
NLMK USA is hardly alone in conducting a fall outage.
US Steel has taken a month-long outage on the No. 3 blast furnace at its Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania. The company has also slated a week-long outage at its Big River Steel EAF sheet mill in Arkansas for late October.
And on the plate side, SSAB Americas has moved up a planned outage from October into September.
That list is a not comprehensive but provides some sense of the wave of outages underway or upcoming.
By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com

Michael Cowden
Read more from Michael CowdenLatest in Steel Mills

Ternium pushes forward with growth projects despite slump in earnings and Mexican market
Ternium S.A. Fourth quarter ended Dec.31 2024 2023 Change Net sales $3,876 $4,931 -21.4% Net income (loss) $333 $554 -39.9% Per diluted share $1.43 $2.11 -32.2% Full year ended Dec.31 Net sales $17,649 $17,610 0.2% Net income (loss) $174 $986 -82.4% Per diluted share $(0.27) $3.44 -108% (in millions of dollars except per share) While […]

Kestenbaum, Ancora state their case in proxy fight for U.S. Steel
Ancora Holdings is moving forward with its proxy fight to oust U.S. Steel’s leadership and install a new board of directors and Alan Kestenbaum as CEO.
BlueScope shelves midstream facility but still upbeat on US
BlueScope Steel is pulling back on its expansion plans in the US for now but remains optimistic about the North American market.

Japanese PM cites ‘unjust political interference’ in Nippon/USS deal: Report
Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said on Monday that former President Joe Biden’s decision to block Nippon Steel’s buy of U.S. Steel was “unjust political interference,” according to a report in Reuters. This comes after another Reuters report on Friday saying that President Trump would not object to Nippon taking a minority stake in the […]

Trump says Nippon will ‘invest heavily’ in USS rather than buy it
Nippon Steel has agreed to “invest heavily in U.S. Steel as opposed to own it,” President Donald Trump said on Friday during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. U.S. Steel is “a very important company” and was once “the greatest company in the world”. Of potential foreign ownership of the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker, Trump said, “the concept, psychologically, not good."