By Karen E. Thuermer, AJOTGood news for transportation providers and seaports such as the Port of New Orleans, a major transshipment port for steel. Plans for another steel mill to be built along the Mississippi River are underway – this one for Nucor Steel. Nucor Steel announced in September its plans to build a multi-phased, state-of-the-art $3.4 billion iron and steel production complex on the east side of the Mississippi River in Convent, St. James Parish, LA. The long term plan of the plant, which is expected to have an annual capacity of 2.5 million tons, is to make its own pig iron to help control supply and prices. The company had also considered building the plant in Brazil, instead of the United States. The project will be built in five phases and produce six million tons of pig iron per year. It will serve its mini-mills upriver. Those mills turn the product into steel. The first phase is a $750 million direct-reduced iron plant employing 150 people. Construction will begin once the company receives a new air quality permit from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Nucor Chief Operating Officer John Ferriola said he hopes that goal can be reached this year. The plant would be completed two years after receiving the permit, Ferriola said. The additional phases of the project could come in any order depending on which asset the company wants to pursue next. The other phases are: a second direct-reduced iron facility costing $400 million; a $500 million pellet plant; a $1 billion blast furnace and coke ovens; and a $750 million steel mill. Plans for High Capacity By choosing St. James Parish, Nucor also plans to build a new high-capacity port on the river that will be capable of handling ocean vessels as well as barges of coal and pig iron. By doing this, the steel mill would expand the impact of the Nucor complex because it would be able to feed steel product makers who might choose to establish plants in the region. The port is a significant part of the project since shipping is a major cost for steel product companies. By having this port in St. James Parish on the Mississippi they could save big bucks by reducing the distance from their suppliers. According to a report issued by Nucor, the company’s next step is to implement a raw materials strategy to control a 6 to 7 million tons-per-year supply of high quality scrap substitutes. Executives see this building on 1.8 million tons at its Trinidad direct reduced iron (DRI) plant, Nu-Iron Unlimited, which commenced in December 2006. In September 2004, Nucor acquired the Louisiana assets of American Iron Reduction (“AIR”), a 1.4-million-tons-per-year DRI plant utilizing MIDREX(R) MEGAMOD technology and relocated the assets to Point Lisas, Trinidad, in 2005. There it increased the capacity to 2.0 million tons per year. The Trinidad site benefits from a low cost supply of natural gas and favorable logistics for receipt of Brazilian iron ore and shipment of DRI to the United States. Wide Reach Nucor has other steel mills on the Mississippi River. In Memphis it operates a state-of-the-art special bar quality (SBQ) mill from where the company ships prime rolled bars to customers involved in auto manufacturing as well as oil and gas exploration. One of the reasons Nucor was attracted to Memphis was the growing automobile industry in the South. “We wanted to be positioned for that,” says Thad Solomon, plant manager. Most of what the mill makes will go to U.S. customers, with the rest exported mainly to Europe and Mexico, he said. The mill complements the product offerings of Nucor’s Nebraska and South Carolina SBQ mills, growing Nucor’s business in energy, automotive, heavy equipment and service center markets. In 2009, the total capacity of its bar mills was approximately 8,910,000 tons per year. Not much farther up the Mississippi River, Nucor also owns and operates two large steel mills in Blytheville, ARK – one for recycling scrap