Steel Mills

Indiana Harbor Furnace Ramps Up

August 3, 2014

The ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor #7 blast furnace, which underwent a $70 million planned maintenance in the second quarter, is in the ramp up phase.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this #7 furnace to us,” said Louis Schorsch during ArcelorMittal conference call, “This has been I could say, limping along the last year and a half, or so, which we prepared for this major outage. That’s going to give us probably about 10,000 tonnes per day additional hot metal, as we bring that back on. We brought it back on about seven days early. It’s now more than halfway through the ramp up period. So, we think the asset condition is actually probably the best it’s been in a couple of years for our operations in North America, and, knock on wood, expecting that we will be able to benefit from that in the second half.”

Over the next few weeks we will see if the return of the #7 blast furnace at Indiana Harbor will have an impact on the supply and demand balance in the North American market. Two things may help keep supply down, US Steel has a furnace scheduled to go down later this year (currently they have everything running) and AK Steel Ashland furnace has what could be a major problem. The AK furnace has been down three times over the past year.