This is a revised and resubmitted letter originally published two years ago. In the original letter, “Electric furnaces & steel” (July 16, 2019, TribLIVE), steel producers in the area were urged to start using electric furnaces to produce steel. It is simply much cheaper to melt iron scrap rather than using the archaic coke oven blast furnace route.
U.S. Steel just announced that it is going to build, rather than purchase, its second electric furnace installation at an estimated cost of $3 billion. However, the company is in a quandary as to where to build it.
First, Why did Andrew Carnegie locate his steel-making operations in the Mon Valley? Because there existed an abundance of metallurgical coking coal in the area. Today there exists a similar situation, but the fossil fuel in abundance now is not coal but natural gas.
Steel producers can use natural gas in two major ways. It can be used to produce electricity for the electric furnaces, and it can be reformed to use in the direct reduction process to produce iron briquettes that are then melted in electric furnaces. U.S. Steel’s main competitor and the largest steel producer in the U.S. is now using the process on the Gulf Coast. It becomes necessary when scrap iron becomes scarce. Renewables can also be used to produce the electricity.
So the answer to U.S. Steel’s site selection is the same one Andrew Carnegie came up with a hundred years ago: the Mon Valley.
Larry Josephs
Penn Township Westmoreland County