Steel Mills
U.S. Steel Slates March Maintenance Outage on Granite City B Furnace
Written by Michael Cowden
January 7, 2022
U.S. Steel plans to take a nearly month-long maintenance outage in March on the B blast furnace at its Granite City Works near St. Louis, a company spokeswoman confirmed.
The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker is targeting March 3-28 for the planned outage, she said.
“We do not anticipate customer impact,” the spokeswoman added.
Planned outages typically don’t impact customers because mills can build slab inventories ahead of them. Unplanned outages are the ones that can disrupt customers.
Granite City has two blast furnaces, A and B. The A furnace has been indefinitely idled since April 2020. The B furnace has daily capacity of 3,600 tons, according to SMU’s blast furnace status table.
The last round of maintenance on the B furnace was in October 2021, when U.S. Steel took a seven-day planned outage.
The additional work on Granite City also comes after the company last year completed two outages at its Gary Works in northwest Indiana: a 38-day outage on the No. 6 blast furnace and a 10-day outage on the larger No. 14 furnace.
SMU has updated its blast furnace status table to reflect all of the above developments.
By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com
Michael Cowden
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