Pittsburgh—Cleveland-Cliffs has completed scheduled maintenance on its Middletown, Ohio blast furnace, said CEO Lourenco Goncalves while speaking at S&P Global Platts' Steel Markets North America event on March 30.
Goncalves said the repairs were completed within 15 days and became operational over the past weekend. Initially, the company had provided a 45-day maintenance period for the outage during its fourth quarter earnings call.Cliffs' Middletown blast furnace has a rated annual steelmaking capacity of 2.09 million mt, according to Association for Iron and Steel Technology.
The CEO did not provide any update on the upcoming planned maintenance on its Indiana Harbor No. 7 blast furnace, which was slated to begin following the completion of the Middletown maintenance, according to the fourth quarter earnings call.
Goncalves said the steelmaker is operating eight of its ten blast furnaces with the other two in Ashland, Kentucky and the No. 3 Indiana Harbor both indefinitely idled. There has been no change on the status of the two furnaces that were acquired by Cliffs in the purchases of AK Steel and ArcelorMittal USA's assets.
He stated during the Platts event that the two companies did not have any intentions of restarting the furnaces prior to the acquisitions and there was no change in plans.
The company has previously stated in plans to flex production between six and eight of the blast furnaces amid rotating maintenance schedules. In their "value over volume" approach, Goncalves said they are not denying volume to the market but were exploring their overall production footprint.
