US steel to restart blast furnace at plant Trump pushed to preserve
Rising steel demand and expected outages at other mills owned by the company will enable expanded use of the Granite City Works in southern Illinois.
U.S. Steel plans to resume steelmaking at an Illinois plant where the Trump administration intervened last summer to keep production going.
The company stopped making steel at Granite City Works two years ago and had planned to further curtail operations before the administration blocked the move in September. It said it now sees signs of rising demand that justify restarting one of Granite City’s two blast furnaces early next year to produce molten iron for steel.
U.S. Steel also is expected to need the mill’s steelmaking capacity as some of its other mills undergo improvements promised by Nippon Steel, the new owner of U.S. Steel.
“We are confident in our ability to safely and profitably operate the mill to meet 2026 demand," said U.S. Steel Chief Executive David Burritt.
The company expects to add about 400 employees at Granite City to operate the blast furnace, raising the plant’s workforce to about 1,200, a person familiar with the matter said. The decision to restart the furnace wasn’t influenced by the Trump administration, the person said.
Steel demand has been weak for much of the past two years, reflecting struggles in the manufacturing and construction sectors.
In recent weeks, lead times for filling steel orders at American mills have lengthened, indicating more orders for the metal. The spot market price for coiled sheet steel is $893 a ton, up $93 from the end of September, according to steel market consulting firm CRU.
U.S. Steel also will start supplying about 750,000 tons of steel slabs next year to a Calvert, Ala., steel plant owned by rival ArcelorMittal, as part of a seven-year supply contract announced this past summer.
The Granite City furnace restart comes at a time when Nippon Steel is beginning $11 billion worth of improvements at existing U.S. Steel plants, which includes replacing the lining of the company’s largest blast furnace in Gary, Ind. The work is expected to keep that furnace out of service for months.
Nippon Steel completed its $14.1 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel in June, after striking a deal with the Trump administration that committed the Tokyo-based steelmaker to the plant investments and other pledges.
Nippon Steel also granted President Trump and future U.S. presidents so-called golden share authority over plant closings, the transfer of production work out of the country and other operational changes at U.S. Steel.
The Trump administration invoked that authority in September after U.S. Steel notified about 800 workers at the Granite City plant that it planned to stop rolling slabs of steel from other plants into sheet steel. U.S. Steel said it intended to continue paying the employees into 2027, even without regular work at the plant.
Leaders for the United Steelworkers union objected and urged the company to continue production at the plant. Granite City, located near St. Louis, has the capacity to produce about 3 million tons of sheet steel annually, but has operated below that volume for most of the past decade.
U.S. Steel idled the Granite City mill in 2015, when steel prices were low. Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2018, helping lift domestic steel prices and prompting the company to restart the plant. Trump praised the move as proof of the tariff’s success at reviving domestic steel production.
The company idled one of Granite City’s furnaces in spring 2020 when Covid-19 shut down factories and construction sites. The second furnace ran until fall 2023.
Write to Bob Tita at robert.tita@wsj.com
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