Published by: Alesha Alkaff<>
25 Feb 2025 @ 18:06 UTC
US steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs is aiming to invest $100 million in its projects in Middletown, Ohio; Butler, Pennsylvania; and Weirton, West Virginia, in 2025, Lourenco Goncalves, chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday February 25.That’s pretty much what we are planning to spend this year. It all depends on how things will go, particularly in the Middletown one, the CEO said.
The project at the company’s Middletown Works integrated facility in Ohio involves the steelmaker replacing its blast furnace with a hydrogen-ready direct-reduced iron (DRI) plant with a capacity for 2.5 million tonnes per year and two 120 MW electric melting furnaces (EMFs) to feed molten iron to existing infrastructure, including the basic oxygen furnace (BOF), caster, hot strip mill and various finishing facilities.
In March, Cleveland-Cliffs was selected for award negotiations for up to $500 million by the US Department of Energy (DOE), as part of former President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to decarbonize energy-intensive industries and reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
In September, the DOE awarded an initial $9.5 million for the first phase of a project to demonstrate hydrogen-based ironmaking decarbonization technology at the facility.
The project is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 million tonnes per year, according to the DOE.
Regarding the Middletown project, it’s all about what’s going to happen next with the efforts to produce hydrogen in the area…So that’s the only caveat that I have for that specific project. But we have some time to continue to discuss with the new Department of Energy, and I will go from there, Goncalves said.
The Middletown plant was expected to be operational by 2027, Goncalves said in the company’s previous earnings call in November.
Meanwhile, at the Butler Works facility in Pennsylvania, upon successful award negotiations of $75 million, Cleveland-Cliffs would replace two of its natural-gas-fired high-temperature slab reheat furnaces with four electrified-induction slab reheat furnaces to maximize efficiency in its electrical steel production.
You know how important grain oriented electrical steel (GOES) is for us. So, we’ll continue to spend that money, Goncalves said. My goal with electric steels has always been to produce transformers.
Cleveland-Cliffs is the only domestic producer of electric steel in the US and will continue to be in the foreseeable future, the CEO said. GOES is a key component used in transformers for electric vehicles (EVs).
There’s plenty of room for other suppliers to produce grain oriented electrical steel, but we need to have one thing that people talk loosely about, but sometimes there’s nothing behind [it] — it’s called technology, Goncalves said. We have the technology to produce the grain oriented electrical steel. So we’re good at that. We have no competition. Competition would be welcome.
The Butler facility is expected to be operational by late 2026 to early 2027, the CEO told investors in the company’s third-quarter earnings call in November.
Meanwhile, the steelmaker’s transformer plant at Weirton, West Virginia, is scheduled to be operational by early 2026.
We are moving very, very expeditiously to start producing transformers in Weirton, Goncalves said.
No6 BF at Cleveland Works to remain indefinitely idled The integrated steelmaker’s C-6 blast furnace (BF) at its flat-rolled steel mill Cleveland, Ohio, is to remain idled indefinitely.
There’s no subject to discuss on C-6 right now. It’s indefinitely idled and will remain indefinitely idled until we decide otherwise, Goncalves said on Tuesday.
The BF was placed on hot idle in October, sources previously told Fastmarkets, and was then expected to resume operations in early 2025, Goncalves said in November.
The BF was temporarily idled due to ongoing demand weakness and took an estimated 1.5 million tons of annual capacity off the market, Celso Goncalves, executive vice president and chief financial officer, told investors in November.