United States Steel Corp. announced a series of aggressive and meaningful actions to provide greater certainty on the company’s response to impacts from the coronavirus (COVID-19) and the significant changes in global oil and gas markets. These actions will strengthen the company’s ability to serve customers, partner with suppliers and ensure a more secure future for employees. As such, U.S. Steel will idle the #4 blast furnace at its Gary Works immediately to begin a planned outage. In addition, the company will temporarily idle blast furnace A at Granite City Works effective immediately. U.S. Steel also plans to idle, beginning in late May, all or most of its Lone Star Tubular Operations and Lorain Tubular Operations for an indefinite period of time in response to weak tubular market conditions.

The outage at Gary Works was originally planned to begin in April and last for 48 days. The scope of the current outage has been reduced and the remainder of the Gary #4 blast furnace outage is being delayed. The company expects the Gary #4 blast furnace to remain idled until market conditions improve. As previously communicated, the company will also complete the indefinite idling of the iron and steelmaking facilities at Great Lakes Works.

U.S. Steel will continue to monitor the impacts of the coronavirus on its order book and will regularly assess the footprint required to support its customers’ needs.   

In related news, the impacts to U.S. Steel’s current strategic projects are as follows:

• The company plans to delay construction of the endless casting and rolling line and cogeneration facility at its Mon Valley Works.  On March 23, the Allegheny County Health Department announced, after consultation with the company, that a temporary pause in the permitting process is appropriate given the challenges posed to the public comment process while COVID-19 public health orders are in effect in Allegheny County. U.S. Steel currently expects groundbreaking for this project to be delayed for an indeterminate period of time until market conditions become more certain. 
• The company currently expects to complete the EAF at Tubular as planned, with first arc anticipated in the second half of 2020. 
• The company currently has paused planned upgrades at its Gary Hot Strip Mill (HSM) and will continue to evaluate the pace and timeline for completing the remaining investments in the HSM.