Steel Mills
Nucor Gallatin Expansion To Ramp Up in June After 1-Wk Outage
Written by Michael Cowden
May 25, 2022
Nucor Corp. will begin to ramp up the $650 million expansion and upgrade of its Gallatin sheet mill in Ghent, Ky., next month, a company spokeswoman confirmed.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based steelmaker will take a one-week outage from Tuesday, May 31, to Tuesday, June 7, for final equipment installation.
The ramp will begin after that, she told SMU on the sidelines of the AISI-SMA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
SMU has updated its new capacity table to reflect the news, which was not unexpected.
Nucor president and CEO Leon Topalian said during an earnings conference call in April that Gallatin had already commissioned its new electric arc furnace (EAF) and ladle metallurgy furnace (LMF). Commissioning of its caster and a second down coiler followed that. The final task was a seven-day outage in early June to install Gallatin’s roughing mill and hot mill crop shear.
Recall that Nucor in 2018 announced plans to roughly double Gallatin’s capacity from 1.6 million tons per year to 3 million tons per year. Doing so required adding a second EAF and caster.
Nucor expects to ship approximately 500,000 tons of Gallatin’s new capacity in 2022, with the facility hitting at a run rate of three million tons per year by the third quarter.
Separately, the steelmaker’s new, $1.35 billion plate mill in Brandenburg, Ky., remains on track to start up at the end of the year, the spokeswoman said. That stands in contrast to other new mills and expansions, some which have fallen significantly behind schedule, she noted.
By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com
Michael Cowden
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