Integrated steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs will take a nearly three-month outage at a blast furnace in Cleveland.
The outage is for maintenance that will run 19 March-11 June, according to a market source.
The Cleveland steel mill and its two blast furnaces have raw steel production capacity of 3mn short tons (st)/yr, according to Cleveland-Cliffs. Production is split relatively evenly between each furnace.
The outage could cost the company up to 350,000st of raw steel production, in addition to time needed to ramp back up to full production rates.
Cleveland-Cliffs did not return a request for comment.
The planned outage is the latest signal from steelmakers that they will pull whatever levers they can to slow the slide in flat-rolled prices. Electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaker Nucor plans to ramp up its Gallatin, Kentucky, flat-rolled mill to full capacity only if demand warrants, while integrated steelmaker US Steel said it will take its Granite City mill down for most of March. EAF steelmaker Steel Dynamics (SDI) will take until the fourth quarter to get to full run rates for its new 3mn st/yr flat-rolled mill in Sinton, Texas.
The Argus US hot rolled coil (HRC) Midwest assessment has fallen by 37pc since its peak in September 2020 to $1,249/st on 1 February.
