Market Segment
September 1, 2026
JSW Steel USA moves 45-day outage to Sept amid value-add push
Written by Michael Cowden
JSW Steel USA has pushed back the planned outage at its plate mill in Baytown, Texas, the company’s top executive said.
The 45-day outage will now take place in September instead of August, as initially planned, JSW Steel CEO Robert Simon said.
“We expect production in Baytown to increase maybe as much as 20% once this is all up and running. So, a very exciting time there,” he said.
Other upgrades include a hydraulic crown and down-camber control (HCDC) unit, which will let Baytown produce thicker plate. The company also wants to target value-added grades, Simon said.
He made the comment during a panel discussion on the plate and energy markets at the SMU Steel Summit on Wednesday, Aug. 26. Simon noted the outage would begin roughly 10 days from that date.
The upgrades at Baytown come amid a broader market shift toward more value-added products, Simon and other panel executives said.
Baytown (and Mingo) background
The Baytown outage and $110 million in upgrades came after JSW Steel USA completed an extended outage and $145 million in upgrades at its steel mill in Mingo Junction, Ohio.
The Mingo Junction mill makes slabs that are rolled into coil at ATI Inc.’s rolling mill in Brackenridge, Pa., or into plate at the Baytown mill. Among the improvements at Mingo was the capacity to cast slabs up to 12 inches thick.
“The facility not long ago was shut down and had gone through multiple failures,” Simon recalled. “Now it boasts one of the most modern casters out there. Very cool stuff!”
JSW Steel USA, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate JSW Steel, bought the Mingo Junction mill in 2018 from Acero Junction.
The mill was idled during the pandemic in 2020 and restarted in 2021. It had previously been idled during the financial crisis in 2009—and subsequently spent much of the next decade idled.
The facility also changed ownership several times. Mingo’s EAF was installed in 2004 under Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. The ownership moved to Esmark in 2007, Russia’s OAO Severstal in 2008, and to RG Steel in 2011.
The Frontier Group of Companies, known for repurposing brownfield sites, purchased the Mingo Junction assets from RG Steel, which had gone bankrupt, in 2012 for $20 million.
SSAB slates outage at Iowa
SSAB Americas Chief Commercial Officer Jeff Moskaluk said the company’s plate mill in Iowa would go down for routine maintenance in September.
“It’s planned, and it’s mostly based around the hot end,” Moskaluk said. “With refractory and everything else, it’s pretty sophisticated maintenance.”
The downtime on the hot end will also allow time for any necessary work on the facility’s rolling mill.
SSAB Americas—part of Sweden’s SSAB—operates two plate mills in the US—one in Montpelier, Iowa, and one in Mobile, Ala.
“We take each mill down every second year. So that means one of the mills is down every year,” Moskaluk noted.
SSAB is also investing in its facilities, with the money focused on expanding its premium products offering. That includes plate for military shipbuilding, advanced high-strength steels, and low-emission steels, where its parent company is a leader.
“We’ve advanced all of them, and we keep investing there because that’s where customers are asking us to go with them,” Moskaluk said. “So that’s where our spend is in the domestic market.”
No outage at OSM
Oregon Steel Mills (OSM) took an outage last year at its plate mill in Portland, Ore., and has no plans to take an outage this year, OSM President Doyle Hopper said.
“We’re going to run full,” he said. “Get in this market and stay in this market while it’s hot.”
Like Simon and Moskaluk, Hopper said the plate sector is increasingly focused on value-added products.
“The whole industry has changed from a commodity grade to a more engineered grade,” he said. “We don’t see A36 anymore. Everything has moved to Grade 50.”
