Steel Mills

USS Mon Valley Works Cold Mill Slow To Return From October Outage

November 9, 2023

U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania has not resumed full production of cold-rolled coil (CRC) following an outage last month, a company spokeswoman confirmed.

“The Mon Valley Works Irvin Plant conducted a planned 14-day outage on the cold mill which ended at the end of October,” she said in an email to SMU on Wednesday.

“Coming out of the outage, the cold mill has been operating, but not up to full production due to electrical drive commissioning,” she added.

Recall that Mon Valley Works is spread across several locations. Its furnaces are located at U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson plant in Braddock, Pa. That facility makes slabs and rails them to the company’s Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, Pa., where they are rolled into sheet.

The revamped electric drive should allow the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker to serve its customers better in the future, the spokeswoman said.

“With a strong backlog of orders in Q4, we are working with all of our customers to meet their needs, as we work up to full production,” she said.

The outage comes during a time of high US prices and scarce spot availability resulting from long lead times at domestic mills.

Case in point: SMU’s CRC price stands at $1,065 per ton ($53.25 per cwt) on average, up 18% from $900 per ton a month ago. CRC is also up 23% from a 2023 low of $865 per ton in late September, according to our interactive pricing tool.

Cold-rolled lead times, meanwhile, are 6.90 weeks, up 23% from 5.59 weeks in early/mid-October and up 52% from 4.55 weeks in late September. You can find SMU’s latest lead time data here.

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.