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Essar seeks $1 million for blast furnace retrofit

Sault Ste. Marie’s largest single employer says it plans to add hundreds of jobs within the next few months with plans to bring an additional blast furnace back into service.
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Essar Steel Algoma is seeking $1 million from the City of Sault Ste. Marie to help it get a mothballed blast furnace up and running, which would increase hot metal production and require 200 new jobs. (PHOTO SUPPLIED)

Sault Ste. Marie’s largest single employer says it plans to add hundreds of jobs within the next few months with plans to bring an additional blast furnace back into service.

In a letter to Sault Mayor Christian Provenzano, Kalyan Gosh, Essar Steel Algoma’s president and CEO, requests the city make a complimentary investment of $1 million in return for “sizeable economic benefits” the company said will result.

The money will be used to bring a mothballed blast furnace back into service.

“In order to secure our competitive market position and meet the evolving product needs of our customers, our analysis shows we need to start-up No. 6 blast furnace by November 2015,” said Ghosh in the letter.

The request will be addressed at the city’s Jan. 26 council meeting.

A restart of the company’s No. 6 blast furnace would increase hot metal production by one million tons and add “upwards of” 200 new jobs at the plant.

Blast furnace No. 7, currently the steelmaker’s only operational blast furnace, has a capacity of 2.8 million tons.

Idle for more than a decade, the smaller secondary blast furnace was restarted briefly in 2008 after a $40-million rebuild.

The company plans to hire more than 200 additional personnel by April to have them trained and ready for when the furnace comes back online, and said the move would translate into an additional 750 or more job in manufacturing and services industry.

 

This story, written by Kenneth Armstrong, originally appeared on Sootoday.com.