Republic Steel will start to produce pig iron at its Lorain steel mill in Ohio as part of a recent deal announced with Virginia-based ERP Iron Ore. The joint venture will reignite one of Republic’s two blast furnaces in the previously idled Lorain site, which will require some infrastructure upgrades to accommodate the project.
The project is expected to be complete by mid-2018 with an annual production capacity of 1 million tons of pig iron. According to ERP’s CEO Tom Clark, the joint venture is expected to capture a large portion of the estimated 3 million tons of imported pig iron in the US market annually. Additionally, the idled EAF on the Lorain site may come online with its own pig iron feedstock in the “right economic conditions,” according to the company.