new steel mill

how many employees are there in an operation like that? how is the safety record?

during the initial construction it was over 6000 workers, our contracting division had 2500 people on site for over a year.

Currently the plant is operating with 320 people, this will increase to @750 when they ramp up the second caster and furnace.

The safety record of these minimills is outstanding. they are really on the ball safety wise several of the Nucor Steel mills have gone over 2 years without an injury

So, instead of sending the profits to Japan, we send them to Russia. I have to wonder why no American steel company is willing to build such a modern plant?

Paul

Paul,

Nucor has built 12 in the last 30 years, the average life of a steel mill is 50 years. ( and they are currently building 2)

Severcorr is an American company and Severstall , a partner in the company has as many facilities in this hemisphere as its own. Not to mention that every dollar for the company ( 1.5 B ) was raised domestically, Severstall provides financial backing to the company it is essentially the cream of the Nucor crop start up

You do know who Nucor is right? The company who revolutionized steel making and revived steel making in this country ?

dont know where your "Japan" reference comes from, with the exception of high quality Rail, over 80 percent of steel used in North America comes for North or South America. The steel dumping done by China and Japan are a thing of the past, Japan was dumping automotive grade steels which are now produced cheaper here, and China was dumping structurals and plate of which they are a net importer now.

Dont listen to the media and the unions, the truth is out there if your willing to look for it

You might note that the plant is a joint veture with Steelcor, an American company. You might also look at the Nucor website and the WSJ. Nucor is upgrading some plants to produce high grade cold rolled steel.

Dan

Damn that is good news. I thought the tree huggers had killed off the US steel industry.

Wes

Just be aware that Nucor and the other low-cost US steelmaking operations are scrap remelters using electric arc furnaces, not primary producers. In an advanced economy like ours the remelt business actually dominates steel production, as it should at this stage in history. And Nucor still is not producing auto-body-grade strip -- unless it's done so in the last few months.

China produces something like 400 million tons of steel, to our 100 million or so tons. But China's construction boom is so hot that they're consuming

417 million tons. When they catch up, expect them to start dumping cheap steel on world markets again.

-- Ed Huntress

for the record

SteelCorr is the parent of Severcorr , it is the company Dan Correnti started after leaving Nucor , he is the CEO that made Nucor what it is today.

Nucor is currently doing a complete gut and rebuild of two former Birmingham Steel mills , one in Memphis that we are shipping equipment to and our contracting division is piping right now, called an SBQ mill which stands for Special Bar Quality .

The Severcorr plant is 10x as large as a tyupical minimill due to the amount of post processing they can perform.

The Nucor plant in Blytheville, AR that is partnered with Yamato Steel makes structurals, you have not seen anything until you 30" wide flanges , glowing orange traveling by .

Steel. its whats for breakfast

I noticed they are remelters after I posted. But we do have a lot of steel to reprocess likely at a lower cost than making it from ore.

I wonder how much of the polution from China's raw ore production makes it to the US? I also wonder how cheap their steel would be if they had to meet our or western europes enviromental regulations?

Wes

Primary Producers? Nucor is the top US steel producer having recently surpassed US Steel, Arcelor-Mittal is the worlds largest. We have equipment in plants of the all of the top ten producers and 15 out of the top 25. we only have equipment in one of Arcelor- Mittals plants , but we hope to change that in the coming years. Our biggest area of growth is South korea and China, we have dominated our feild in Japan for years

China wont catch up, neither will India. China will build more mills in the next 10 years than have been built in world in the last 50. Their production amounts are expected to drop by 30 percent in the next few years before the new ones come on line, they have some huge mills that they have to shutter.

We are currently quoting and building equipment for mills in Korea, China, India and South Africa

While scrap does make up a good portion of the charge in most EAF furnaces , the change to DRI as a large portion is growing rapidly.

Direct reduced Iron , can be made efficiently by large BOF mills and is a higher quality melt than standard scrap. DRI can aslo be sourced more cheaply than scrap steel at some times of the year. There is a lot of scrap producers that are contracted for their entire output for years to come to shipping overseas.

Nucor owns a couple of large scrap operations.

in the next decade you can expect to see most of the large BOF mills converting to Electric Arc furnaces fed with DRI made in the BOF

Oh, yeah. And Nucor has developed their processes to a high degree of refinement. They can make steel in the lower and middling grades a LOT cheaper than making it from ore. I don't know how their costs compare on higher grades but they've concentrated on lower grades up till now.

When they refine steel from scrap they not only have to get out the basic impurities, essentially sulfur and phosphorus (much of which is eliminated just by using scrap to begin with), but they also have to react-out the minor metal alloying ingredients that show up in scrap.

Ya' got me.

Not nearly as cheap, to be sure. But they have other cost advantages as well. The guys who dig ore and coal, and who ship it to the steel mills, also make 80 cents/hour. They have advantages in embedded-labor costs up and down the whole supply chain.

-- Ed Huntress

Terminology. Primary producers are those that make metal from ore. Secondary producers re-melt scrap. Nucor is a secondary producer.

That has nothing to do with their size. It's just a distinction concerning where the metal comes from. When I was covering metal producing for trade magazines, secondary aluminum was getting really big, but secondary steel was still a small business that made junk steel (basic structural steel). Nucor has changed the whole equation. But they're still a secondary producer, in industry terms.

Is South Korea mostly doing primary or re-melt these days? It's always been assumed that re-melt would eventually dominate steel production in advanced economies. I'd think that South Korea must be approaching that point. China, though, is still predominantly a primary producer.

That's interesting. I've read that Nucor is using DRI for their higher grades. BOF's typically use 35 - 40% scrap in a charge, anyway (or they did, when I was covering the industry) so the worldwide demand for scrap will remain high in any case.

-- Ed Huntress

================= Without doing a detailed analysis, more than likely it is because the executives and directors of the domestic [US] steel [steal?] companies did the math and determined that for a given investment, it was more profitable, at least on paper and in the short run (on which their "performance" bonuses are based), to "invest" the money in financial (speculative) activities such as "special investment vehicles [SIVs], hedge funds, and high yield securities [aka junk bonds], without the aggravation of dealing with construction permits, environmental impact statements, marketing, environmental regulations, and labor unions.

Much of the problem can be traced to the deeply flawed US tax system with its treatment/definition of "capital gains" which in fact add nothing to the actual total capital stock of the US economy and indeed frequently *DECREASE* the capital stock total, as in the case of restructuring made possible by M&A/LBO activity, and stock buy-backs with borrowed funds, the interest of which is tax deductible.