U.S. Steel has begun the process of restarting the idled \u2018B\u2019 blast furnace at its Granite City Works near St. Louis.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter several months of carefully analyzing customer demand, we made the decision to restart a blast furnace,\u201d U.S. Steel President and CEO David B. Burritt said in a statement <\/a>on Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n \u201cSteel 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,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker\u2019s decision to restart the \u2018B\u2019 furnace comes after it said in September it would continue to roll slabs at Granite City<\/a>.<\/p>\n Granite City Works idled its \u2018A\u2019 blast furnace in April 2020 and \u2018B\u2019 in 2023, according to SMU\u2019s\u00a0blast furnace status table<\/a>. The facility had an annual raw steelmaking capacity of 2.8 million net tons.<\/p>\n A U-turn on Granite City<\/p>\n U.S. Steel\u00a0said in early September<\/a>\u00a0it would stop shipping slabs to Granite City Works at the end of October. The move would have effectively idled Granite City\u2019s hot strip mill.<\/p>\n 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.)<\/p>\n But President Trump invoked his \u201cgolden share<\/a>\u201d in the company to stop that from happening.<\/p>\n Note that Nippon Steel cannot close, idle, or sell the Granite City mill before June 18, 2027. That\u2019s because of\u00a0terms of a partnership agreement<\/a>\u00a0approved by President Trump that allowed Nippon\u2019s acquisition of U.S. Steel to proceed.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The USW cheered the move. \u201cWe look forward to seeing production return and our members doing what they do best \u2014 safely producing high-quality American steel,\u201d USW International President David McCall said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. Steel has begun the process of restarting the idled \u2018B\u2019 blast furnace at its Granite City Works…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[167779,4,450,451,3,167780,452,453,3479,73384],"class_list":{"0":"post-330974","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-blast-furnace","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-section-232","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topstories","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-u-s-steel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}