Steel Mills

NLMK USA Slates Oct-Nov Outage at Indiana Sheet Mill

September 21, 2022

NLMK USA has planned a roughly month-long outage for upgrades to its electric-arc furnace (EAF) sheet mill in Portage, Ind.

The work is scheduled for October and November and will be focused on enhancements to the plant’s melt shop and hot strip mill, a company spokesman said.

NLMK NLMK USA in emails to customers specified the dates as Oct. 24 through the week of Nov. 20.

“Our contract customers and regular spot buyers are covered throughout these outages,” the spokesman said, noting that the work was planned and scheduled well in advance.

Work on the melt shop will be aimed at improving its reliability. The outage on the hot strip mill is to implement a new automated gauge control (AGC) system, he said.

“That will enable us to hold quarter standard ASTM tolerances throughout our full range of products at Indiana,” the spokesman said.

NLMK USA operates an EAF steel mill in Portage, Ind., a hot strip mill and cold reduction mill in Farrell, Pa., and a galvanizing facility in Sharon, Pa. The Portage mill has a capacity of 800,000 tons per year.

NLMK USA is hardly alone in conducting a fall outage.

US Steel has taken a month-long outage on the No. 3 blast furnace at its Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania. The company has also slated a week-long outage at its Big River Steel EAF sheet mill in Arkansas for late October.

And on the plate side, SSAB Americas has moved up a planned outage from October into September.

That list is a not comprehensive but provides some sense of the wave of outages underway or upcoming.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com

Michael Cowden

Michael Cowden is managing editor for Steel Market Update. Cowden has covered the steel industry since 2007. He has since 2014 specialized in flat-rolled steel but has previously reported on steel long products, steel pipe and tube as well as aluminum. Before joining SMU, Cowden held reporting jobs at Fastmarkets AMM in Chicago - where he was involved in launching AMM's daily hot-rolled coil index, 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.