Market Segment
December 4, 2025
BREAKING NEWS: USS plans to restart Granite City 'B' blast furnace
Written by Michael Cowden
U.S. Steel has begun the process of restarting the idled ‘B’ blast furnace at its Granite City Works near St. Louis.
“After several months of carefully analyzing customer demand, we made the decision to restart a blast furnace,” U.S. Steel President and CEO David B. Burritt said in a statement on Thursday afternoon.
“Steel remains a highly competitive and highly cyclical industry, but we are confident in our ability to safely and profitably operate the mill to meet 2026 demand,” he added.
The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker’s decision to restart the ‘B’ furnace comes after it said in September it would continue to roll slabs at Granite City.
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.
A U-turn on Granite City
U.S. Steel said in early September 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 it would cease running downstream pickling and oiling (P&O), cold rolling, and coating lines as well. (It stressed that there would be no layoffs despite the halt in production.)
But President Trump invoked his “golden share” in the company to stop that from happening.
Note that 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.
There had been chatter that a furnace at Granite City might be restarted. The United Steelworkers (USW) union had pressed for a restart. Also, there is a history of furnaces restarting at Granite City following interventions from Trump. Notably, the mill restarted idled blast furnaces following the initial imposition of Section 232 tariffs in 2018.
The USW cheered the move. “We look forward to seeing production return and our members doing what they do best — safely producing high-quality American steel,” USW International President David McCall said in a statement.
