German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp will build a $3.7 billion state-of-the-art carbon-steel and stainless-steel processing facility in Alabama. The site is near Mt. Vernon on the Tombigbee River, approximately 25 miles north of Mobile. Louisiana was the other finalist for the project. The carbon steel portion of the new facility will have an annual capacity of 4.1 million metric tons of carbon steel end products. The facility will include a hot strip mill to process slabs from ThyssenKrupp’s new steel plant in Brazil. Scheduled to open in 2010, the plant will employ as many as 2,700 people when fully operational. Construction is expected to begin by the end of 2007.

The facility will also include a stainless-steel meltshop with an annual capacity of up to 1 million metric tons of slabs, which will be processed on the hot strip mill, and it will feature a cold rolling mill that will be designed to produce 350,000 tons of cold strip and 125,000 tons of pickled hot strip.