Steel Products
SDI Columbus EAF Down ~10 Days on Unplanned Outage
Written by Michael Cowden
June 24, 2021
Steel Dynamics Inc. (SDI) is making repairs after an unplanned outage at an electric-arc furnace (EAF) at its flat-rolled steel mill in Columbus, Miss., according the company’s top executive.
The outage, which occurred last weekend, is expected to result in approximately 10 days of lost production, or about 25,000-30,000 tons of hot metal, SDI President and CEO Mark Millett said in an email to Steel Market Update.
The incident happened when hot metal burned through one of the mill’s two EAFs. “There was no explosion, but a large amount of molten metal poured into the slag pit. There were no injuries,” he said.
Radiant heat also burned some wiring on the No. 1 furnace and resulted in it being down for approximately 10-12 hours, he said.
SDI has two EAFS at the Columbus mill with a combined annual capacity of 3.1 million tons per year, according to the Association for Iron & Steel Technology’s 2021 Directory of Iron and Steel Plants.
By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com
Michael Cowden
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