Final Thoughts
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Restart of Indiana Harbor No7 Blast Furnace Proceeding: Cliffs
Written by Michael Cowden
December 2, 2022
Cleveland-Cliffs is in the process of restarting the No. 7 blast furnace at its Indiana Harbor steel mill in East Chicago, Ind.
“All good with the re-start procedure that is ongoing,” a company spokeswoman said in an email to Steel Market Update on Friday, Dec. 2.
The Cleveland-based steelmaker said that there had been a minor fire at the furnace ahead of planned maintenance last weekend.
Cliffs said on Monday, Nov. 28, that the furnace would be restarted within the week.
An outage at No. 7 is notable because it is the largest blast furnace in North America. It has a capacity of 11,500 tons of iron per day. It is also the only active blast furnace at Indiana Harbor, according to SMU’s blast furnace status table.
Approximately 20 miles south of Chicago, Indiana Harbor has an annual steelmaking capacity of 5.5 million tons. It makes a full range of hot-rolled, cold-rolled, and coated products – including exposed grades for the automotive industry and American Petroleum Institute (API) grades for the energy sector.
Other key markets for the mill include appliance, construction, and distribution, per a fact sheet about the plant.
By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com
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Michael Cowden
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Final thoughts
SMU has heard from some larger buyers who have stepped back into the market to buy at prices that, if not at a bottom, they assess to be close to one. Is it enough to stretch out lead times and send prices upward again? Or do we continue to scrape along the mid-$600s per short ton (st) as we have been doing for most of the last month?
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Final thoughts
Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman, President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves had some insightful things to say today about the steel market and about a conference we suspect might be Steel Summit.
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Final thoughts
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, when you add in some commentary from respected peers in the steel industry to those pictures, that may shoot you up to five thousand words, at least. In that spirit, we’ve added some snapshots from our market survey this week, along with some comments from market participants.
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Final thoughts
I thought we’d have more clarity this week on Section 232, Mexico, and a potential carve-out for steel melted and poured in Brazil. As of right now, the only official comment I have is from the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
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Final thoughts
There are just 40 days left until the 2024 SMU Steel Summit gets underway on Aug. 26 at the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC) in Atlanta. And I’m pleased to announce that it's official now: More than 1,000 people have registered to at attend! Another big development: The desktop version of the networking app for the event has officially launched!