Cliffs Restarts Middletown Blast Furnace

Cliffs’s Middletown Works has one furnace, the No. 3. The company in January said that it would take the Middletown furnace down for maintenance after announcing that it was restarting the No. 6 furnace, which had previously been idle, at its Cleveland Works.

The company said at the time that the move was part of a broader strategy of rotating furnaces on and off as necessary to perform maintenance while at the same time keeping output steady.

Cliffs President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said during a quarterly earnings conference call in February that the No. 7 blast furnace at its Indiana Harbor steel mill in East Chicago, Ind., would be the next to go down for maintenance.

The steelmaker has 10 blast furnaces and plans to keep between six and eight operating. “At any given time, we will probably have some maintenance to perform,” Goncalves said.

Middletown Works makes hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated flat-rolled steel as does Indiana Harbor.

The No. 3 furnace at Middletown has daily capacity of 6,500 tons, according to Steel Market Update’s blast furnace status tool. The No. 7 at Indiana Harbor, the largest in North America, has daily capacity of 11,500 tons.

The spokeswoman did not comment on the timeline and scope of any potential repairs to the No. 7 furnace.

“That’s why we have not entertained these questions about the details involved in these repairs; they do not affect our clients, and therefore Cleveland-Cliffs does not share the details,” she said.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com