Steel Mills

NLMK USA Plans June Outage at Indiana Melt Shop, Hot Mill

March 16, 2021

NLMK USA has slated an approximately one-week maintenance outage in June on the melt shop and hot strip mill at its facility in Portage, Ind., a company official confirmed.

The plant-wide outage is for routine semi-annual maintenance and “isn’t a big deal,” said NLMK USA Executive Vice President James Banker.

NLMK The Portage electric-arc furnace (EAF) sheet mill, also known as NLMK Indiana, typically takes another outage of approximately the same duration again in late November or early December, usually around Thanksgiving, he said.

NLMK Indiana makes hot-rolled coil, hot-rolled pickle and oil, and high carbon and alloy material, according to its website.

Its EAF has capacity of 680,000 tons per year, and its hot strip mill has annual capacity of one million tons per year, according to the Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST) 2021 Directory of Iron and Steel Plants.

NLMK USA is hardly the only steel mill taking a planned maintenance outage in the next few months. North Star BlueScope and AM/NS Calvert are also taking short outages in the spring or early summer, as SMU has previously reported.

U.S. Steel, meanwhile, is taking a more significant 25-day outage on the No. 1 blast furnace at its Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania.

The smaller outages might not be news in an ordinary market. But consumer sources are taking note of them this year given scarce spot supplies and record high steel prices.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com

Michael Cowden

Michael Cowden is editor-in-chief for Steel Market Update. Cowden has covered the steel industry since 2007. He specializes in flat-rolled steel but has also reported on steel long products, steel pipe and tube, and aluminum. Before joining SMU, Cowden held reporting jobs at Fastmarkets AMM in Chicago, the Associated Press in Pittsburgh, and the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. He has also worked as a copy editor and in marketing at the University of Chicago Press. Cowden has a BA in English from the University of Chicago and an MSJ journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Contact him at michael@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-759-7872.