ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor Furnace to be Down for Repairs

“ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor will move forward with a previously scheduled maintenance outage to conduct stove repairs on its No. 3 blast furnace beginning the week of March 16. Preparations to idle the furnace are underway, and the outage is expected to last until late Q2 2015 or until additional capacity is required to meet customer demand. The stove repairs on No. 3 blast furnace will improve the efficiency and reliability of the asset and ultimately allow ArcelorMittal and the Indiana Harbor facility to be well positioned to meet future customer requirements.

“ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor’s No. 4 and No. 7 furnaces will operate as normal. The outage will not impact our ability to meet customer demand.”

The number 3 blast furnace produces approximately 2 million tons of pig iron melt per year. If the furnace is off-line for three months the mill would lose about 490,000 tons of pig iron production. The actual steel production lost would be higher since scrap is added to the pig iron in the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) in order to produce the final molten steel heats. You can learn more about the steel making process as well how steel is bought and sold, how commodities impact mills cost to produce and market fundamentals at SMU next Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals workshop which will be held just outside of Chicago on May 19-20, 2015. The workshop includes a tour of the NLMK Indiana steel mill. Details are on our website.