Company Announcements
March 31, 2026
U.S. Steel confirms restart of Granite City B blast furnace
Written by Michael Cowden
U.S. Steel has confirmed the restart of the B blast furnace at its Granite City Works near St. Louis.
The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker said it had also hired 400 workers to keep the furnace running.
“This restart reflects careful preparation and a focus on operating safely and reliably in a highly competitive and cyclical industry,” U.S. Steel President and CEO David Burritt said in a statement on Monday.
SMU reported last week that the B furnace was expected to restart over the weekend.
U.S. Steel announced in December that it would restart the B furnace because of customer demand. Parent company Nippon Steel later said the restart would occur in the second quarter of this year.
U.S. Steel reiterated on Monday that the decision to restart had been driven by customer demand.
The restart of the B furnace comes as U.S. Steel plans to idle the No. 14 blast furnace at its Gary Works outside Chicago from May to August for a $350-million furnace reline.
No. 14 has daily ironmaking capacity of 7,450 short tons (st). The Granite City B furnace is smaller with a daily capacity of 3,600 st.
Trump’s ‘golden share’ and other background
Granite City has two furnaces: A and B. U.S. Steel indefinitely idled the A furnace in 2020, according to SMU’s blast furnace status table.
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 because both the A and B furnaces stood idle at the time.
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 last year.
