Indiana Harbor Furnace Ramps Up

The ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor #7 blast furnace, which underwent a $70 million planned maintenance in the second quarter, is in the ramp up phase.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this #7 furnace to us,” said Louis Schorsch during ArcelorMittal conference call, “This has been I could say, limping along the last year and a half, or so, which we prepared for this major outage. That’s going to give us probably about 10,000 tonnes per day additional hot metal, as we bring that back on. We brought it back on about seven days early. It’s now more than halfway through the ramp up period. So, we think the asset condition is actually probably the best it’s been in a couple of years for our operations in North America, and, knock on wood, expecting that we will be able to benefit from that in the second half.”