Steel Mills

USS Taking 45-Day Outage at Gary Works No. 8 Blast Furnace

Written by Michael Cowden

May 1, 2022

US Steel is in the midst of a 45-day planned outage on the No. 8 blast furnace at its Gary Works in northwest Indiana.

The outage began on April 11 and is for typical repairs, a spokeswoman for the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker told SMU.

She did not have an end date for the repairs. That said, a 45-day outage starting on April 11 indicates work should be completed in late May – on or around May 26.

The outage was disclosed in a slide deck released along with US Steel’s first quarter earnings results.

USS Gary Works outage image

SMU has updated its blast furnace status table to reflect the outage.

No. 8 is the smallest blast furnace at Gary Works with daily iron-making capacity of 3,000 tons. Some context: Gary Work’s No. 14 furnace can make more than twice that. It has daily iron-making capacity of 7,450 tons.

The outage on No. 8 means US Steel is currently producing with six furnaces at its domestic mills: two at its Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania (No. 1 and No. 3), three at Gary Works (No. 4, No. 6, and No. 14), and one at is Granite City Works near St. Louis (B furnace).

Gary Works is US Steel’s largest mill. It has annual steelmaking capacity of 7.5 million net tons and supplies a full range of sheet products as well as plate in coils and tin products, according to the company’s website.

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.

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