Steel rolls along the line at the 80” Hot Strip Mill at Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor Works in East Chicago. Staff photo by Jerry D. Nicholls
Steel rolls along the line at the 80” Hot Strip Mill at Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor Works in East Chicago. Staff photo by Jerry D. Nicholls
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EAST CHICAGO — Indiana Harbor Works in East Chicago remains vital to Cleveland-Cliffs even though the steel mill where 11 blast furnaces were built is down to just one, the CEO said.

Cleveland-Cliffs recently indefinitely idled blast furnace No. 4 on the west side of the mill that was previously owned by LTV, Youngstown Sheet and Tube and Mark Manufacturing. The only iron-producing blast furnace left on the steel mill on the Lake Michigan harbor is Blast Furnace No. 7 on the east side that was along the Inland Steel mill.

The company invested $100 million to reline Blast Furnace No. 7 late last year, setting it up for decades of productivity, Chairman, President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said.

"We're going to have it for the long run," he said. "That's the biggest and most efficient blast furnace in the western hemisphere."

The blast furnace is now using more hot briquetted iron made in Toledo instead of coke, reducing its carbon footprint.

"We are now in a position to use a lot of HBI in the blast furnace and iron ore pellets to reduce coke rate to a level that our emissions are the envy of the world," Goncalves said. "It has the lowest coke rate in the footprint."

Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, now operates seven blast furnaces, three of which are in Northwest Indiana.

Indiana Harbor remains a key piece.

"We have the largest footprint, the biggest plant in the U.S. and North America," he said. "We supply hot metal to not only all of our steelmaking operations in the Indiana Harbor complex, both the east and west sides, but also to Riverdale in Illinois. We send pig iron in rail cars on the railroad. Riverdale does high-carbon steels to a very specific niche market that's extremely profitable. We have a lot of good-paying middle-class union jobs there as well. So it's supremely important and a vital part of our strategy overall."

The company plans to continue to invest in infrastructure and reliability at the steel mill in East Chicago. The Cleveland-based company has a total capital budget of $900 million this year, Goncalves said.

The sprawling mill has four basic oxygen furnaces, four continuous casting machines, an 80-inch hot-strip mill, a five-stand tandem mill, ladle metallurgy facilities, a recycling plant, a pickling line, a temper mill, a slab dimensioning facility, hot dip galvanizing lines and batch and continuous annealing lines.

The former Inland Steel mill on the east side at one time had seven blast furnaces, all named "Madeline" after Madeline Block, the daughter of Inland Steel Company co-founder Philip D. Block.

While there's only one left running now, it's newer and far more massive than the ones it replaced, Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor Works Environmental Manager Tom Barnett said.

"To put it in perspective, our very first blast furnace, Blast Furnace No. 1, could produce 1,000 tons a day," he said. "No. 7 can make 14,000 tons a day. There are fewer blast furnaces left in the United States but all of them make more iron than we used to make."

Traditionally, steel mills have operated more than one blast furnace as they tend to be maintenance-intensive, and sometimes have to be idled for weeks for capital projects to keep them up and running.

Indiana Harbor Works will no longer have a secondary backup blast furnace running in the event of a reline or other big maintenance project but can adjust in new ways, Barnett said.

"Burns Harbor has two blast furnaces that can make 7,000 tons apiece," he said. "You overproduce, get slabs on the ground and get inventory. You run on that. The beauty of Cliffs now is if we're short of slabs or roll we can get them from Middletown. We can get them from Dearborn. We can get them from Cleveland. We can get them from Burns Harbor. There's a lot of flexibility now in this company."
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