Market Segment

USS to continue production at Granite City after 'golden share' pressure from Trump admin

Written by Michael Cowden

September 21, 2025

U.S. Steel said it would continue to roll slabs at its Granite City Works mill near St. Louis, reversing a previous decision to end production at the plant in November.

“U.S. Steel will continue to supply slabs to Granite City. As we shared earlier, our goal was to maintain flexibility, and we are pleased to have found a solution to continue to slab consumption at Granite City,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to SMU.

The abrupt shift happened after the Trump administration, invoking its “golden share” in U.S. Steel, pressured the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker to continue output at Granite City, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Nippon Steel cannot close, idle, or sell the Granite City mill before June 18, 2027. That’s because of terms of a partnership agreement approved by President Trump that allowed Nippon’s acquisition of U.S. Steel to proceed.

U.S. Steel did not confirm or deny the role of the golden share in the decision to continue slab shipments to Granite City.

USW cheers, flexes political influence

The United Steelworkers (USW) union cheered the move in a letter signed by USW International President David McCall and Negotiating Committee Chairman Mike Millsap. The USW also continued to criticize Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel.

“It’s telling that not three months after the sale documents were signed, USS tried to wiggle out of its commitments and make the kind of changes we warned were coming,” McCall and Millsap said in the letter, which was dated Friday, Sept. 19.

“But we wouldn’t let it. We pushed back on USS’s flimsy excuse that it couldn’t supply slabs to Granite City for us to process. We reached out to political leaders to remind them that this was the very situation we foretold,” they added.

The USW in addition pushed for the restart of idled blast furnaces at Granite City.

“Now we must keep the pressure on. In addition to our mills, there are two idled blast furnaces in Granite City that could easily help our nation meet its steel needs,” the union said.

Granite City Works idled its ‘A’ blast furnace in April 2020 and ‘B’ in 2023, according to SMU’s blast furnace status table. The facility had an annual raw steelmaking capacity of 2.8 million net tons.

Background

U.S. Steel said earlier this month that it would stop shipping slabs to Granite City Works at the end of October. The move would have effectively idled Granite City’s hot strip mill.

The company also said that it would cease running downstream pickling and oiling (P&O), cold rolling, and coating lines as well. But it stressed that there would be no layoffs despite the halt in production.

Granite City makes hot-rolled, cold-rolled, and coated sheet for customers in the construction, container, pipe and tube, service center, and automotive sectors.

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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