Red Bud, Illinois-based The Material Works, Ltd. (TMW) announced Thursday that the unprecedented acceptance and growth of Eco Pickled Surface (EPS) technology has forced reconsideration of its plans to open a flat rolled toll processing center adjacent to the Big River Steel mill being currently under construction. TMW will instead expand the capacity of its present Red Bud, Illinois facility to include a new EPS processing and technology center and associated equipment to process the new generation of higher strength steels.
In announcing this development, TMW President Kevin Voges explained, “We made the business case for a new toll processing facility based on the attractiveness of the Big River Steel project. That attractiveness has not diminished one bit. What has changed is the surge in demand, among both our existing customers and potential new customers, for EPS technology, particularly for processing High Carbon, High Strength Low Alloy (HSLA) and Advanced High Strength Steel (AHSS) grades, plus silicon steel and stainless steel. EPS pickles these grades much more cost effectively than acid pickling and will do so along with conventional grades on our new EPS coil line.
We evaluated adding EPS processing to the proposed new facility; however, we have existing infrastructure for EPS – both physical assets and our EPS Technology Team – here in Red Bud that make the economics of expanding ‘in place’ hard to beat. In addition, this new EPS center won’t be just a processing center; it will also be a technology development center, plus a training center for our customers who buy EPS lines.”
TMW’s Red Bud expansion plans also include a new ½” capacity Stretcher Leveler Cut-to-Length line to process both the CQ and some of the higher strength steel products run on the ½” capacity EPS line.
Eric Fritsche, TMW’s Vice President of Processing remarked, “Much of the steel we’ll process on these new lines will still be from Big River because they’ll specialize in these advanced grades of steel. Many of our customers will source the steel from Big River and have it barged here for processing, since we can offload from barge directly into our Red Bud plant. In many cases that low barge freight cost will offset some higher outbound trucking cost for a net freight savings. The bottom line is that we still intend to process for many Big River Steel customers, but now we can include a very profitable value-added processing service – EPS coil pickling – which will be accompanied by three Stretcher Leveler Cut-to-Length lines, two Multicut Blanking lines, and slitting.”