ThyssenKrupp AG has confirmed that it will build a $3.7 billion flat rolled carbon and stainless steel plant in Alabama instead of Louisiana, lured by tax breaks and a $400 million incentives package offered by the state.
The plant will be located at a site along the Tombigbee River, about 25 miles north of Mobile, which offers easy access to the Gulf of Mexico as well as to railways and interstate highways. It is expected to open in 2010 and will employ as many as 2,700 workers.
Louisiana had offered a similar incentives package for the German steel giant to build its first US plant at a site in St. James Parish along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge. However, according to Bob Soulliere, president and CEO of ThyssenKrupp Steel and Stainless USA, the company chose the Alabama site due to "logistical considerations of the company's supply chain from Brazil to our projected customers; operating costs such as electricity and labor; and site specific capital expenditures."
The company said in a press release that the primary element of the plant will be a hot strip mill with a capacity of up to 5.2 million metric tons per year. It will process three million tons of slabs from the new ThyssenKrupp CSA steel mill in Brazil and produce 4.1 million metric tons of flat carbon steel end products per year. Cold rolling and hot-dip coating capacities will also be installed for premium carbon steel end products.
In addition, ThyssenKrupp's stainless division will build an electric steel plant with a capacity of up to one million metric tons of slabs per year which will be rolled on the hot strip mill. A cold rolling facility is also to be erected which, in the first phase, will be designed to produce 350,000 tons of cold rolled strip and 125,000 tons of pickled hot rolled material. A further 340,000 tons of stainless hot rolled produced on the hot strip mill will be supplied to the ThyssenKrupp Mexinox cold rolling facility in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.