Steel Mills

Blast Furnaces

June 18, 2015

Steel Market Update has been asked if the domestic steel mills have made any moves to restart idled blast furnaces in order to increase production due to dumping suits, price increases and the anticipated stronger order book. People also want to know if ArcelorMittal and US Steel are building slab inventories in order to have material available for their contract customers (especially automotive) should there be a production disruption due to the expiration of their labor agreements (September 1st – same day as the first day of our Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta).

We recently did an analysis of blast furnaces in the United States, Mexico and Canada to see what is running and what has returned to production. Essentially, both US Steel and ArcelorMittal have brought back a furnace over the past few weeks. AM brought back a blast furnace at their Cleveland Works and US Steel has/is bringing back their furnace at Fairfield Works in Alabama.

The process of finding out whether furnaces are running at any point in time can be difficult as US Steel and ArcelorMittal don’t always want to address those questions except on a quarterly basis during their conference calls with analysts. The data below is based on our recent research and there could be issues with one or two furnaces so we recommend that our readers check with your mill suppliers should you have any questions.

For those of you who do not realize this, Steel Market Update has a table in our website for our members where we attempt to keep up with the blast furnaces in North America. You must be logged into the website to access the data which looks something like this:

Blast Furnace Steel Mill Status

Mill Name / Plant	Furnace I.D.	Daily Capacity (Net Tons)	Running?	Comments
AK Steel
Ashland	Amanda	6000	Yes
Middletown	No. 3	6500	Yes
AK Dearborn	C Furnace	6000	Yes
AHMSA (Mexico)
	No. 4	2700	No	Idle
	No. 5	6500	Yes
	No. 6	4500	Yes
ArcelorMittal
Hamilton (Canada)	No. 2	3200	Yes
	No. 3	2500	Yes
	No. 4	4700	Yes
Burns Harbor	C Furnace	7400	Yes
Burns Harbor	D Furnace	7400	Yes
Indiana Harbor	IH-3 W	4300	Yes
	IH-4 W	4900	No
	IH-5 E	2900	No
	IH-6 E	5000	No
	IH-7 E	11500	Yes
Cleveland	C-5	4350	Yes
Cleveland	C-6	4150	Yes
Essar Steel Algoma (Canada)
	No. 7	8400	Yes
	No. 6	3000	No	Possible restart in 2015
United States Steel
Edgar Thomson Works	No. 1	3450	Yes
Edgar Thomson Works	No. 3	3100	Yes
Fairfield	No. 8	6000	Yes
Gary Works	No. 4	4200	Yes
	No. 6	3800	No	Down for maintenance, will come back up depending on market conditions
	No. 8	3300	Yes
	No. 14	9200	Yes
Granite City	A Furnace	3600	Yes	One furnace is down to replace caster
Granite City	B Furnace	3600	Yes	One furnace is down to replace caster
Great Lakes (Ecorse, MI)	A-1	4100	Yes*	*Only 2 of the 3 furnaces are running at any given time
	B-2	3700	Yes*
	D-4	4000	Yes*
Hamilton (Canada)	E Furnace	5500	No	Shut down October 4 2010 & removed from active status
Lake Erie (Canada)	No. 1	6575	Yes

Brett Linton

Brett Linton is a digital operations analyst for Steel Market Update, where he began his career. Linton has been in the steel industry since 2010. He has held roles as a category manager and strategic insights director at Reibus before returning to SMU in 2024. He is a graduate of The University of North Georgia with a degree in Finance and Accounting. Brett can be reached at brett@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-314-0179.