Health & Safety Specialist

Cleveland-Cliffs commits $1bn to Middletown Works. August 24, 2026 Cleveland-Cliffs will invest $1 billion modernising its Middletown steelworks complex. The revised programme combines blast-furnace upgrades, process controls, gas recovery, and new materials-handling systems. Cleveland-Cliffs will invest in a US$1 billion modernisation of its Middletown Works steel plant in Ohio, combining US$500 million of company capital with US$500 million in support from the US Department of Energy. The four-year programme retains the site's established blast-furnace steelmaking route and concentrates investment on ironmaking, materials handling, process control, and energy recovery. Work is planned while the wider steelworks remains operational, with completion of the blast-furnace rebuild targeted for the first quarter of 2030. Projects include rebuilding and upgrading the main blast furnace, installing advanced raw-material handling equipment, and introducing artificial-intelligence-enabled process controls. A new cogeneration facility will also use blast-furnace gas to produce electricity and steam for the site. Middletown Works is an integrated operation capable of producing around three million tons of raw steel annually. Changes at the ironmaking stage consequently affect a production system extending through steelmaking, casting, rolling, finishing, utilities, and internal logistics rather than an isolated production cell. The revised investment follows a reassessment of an earlier decarbonisation proposal. The Department of Energy said the previous project configuration depended on customers paying a premium for lower-carbon steel that Cleveland-Cliffs concluded was not commercially supportable under current market conditions. The replacement programme is more closely tied to the economics of the existing plant. Instead of replacing the fundamental ironmaking route, it concentrates on extracting greater operating efficiency, reliability, and energy value from assets that are already embedded in the Middletown production system. Blast-furnace control offers substantial scope for incremental improvement because the process operates continuously across a large number of interacting variables. Burden composition, gas flow, temperature, pressure, fuel rate, furnace condition, and raw-material quality all influence productivity and fuel consumption, making better instrumentation and control valuable even without changing the basic chemistry of iron production. AI-enabled optimisation is intended to improve that control by analysing plant data and supporting adjustments to furnace operation. The commercial gain is unlikely to come from a single dramatic intervention; steelmaking economics are more often changed by small improvements repeated continuously across very large production volumes. The planned cogeneration plant tackles another part of the operating balance. Blast-furnace gas contains combustible constituents that can be recovered and used rather than treated only as a low-value process by-product. Converting more of that gas into electricity and steam can reduce external energy requirements elsewhere on site. Materials recovery is also included in the programme, with Cleveland-Cliffs planning to increase the use of steelmaking by-products in concrete for regional infrastructure. Integrated steelworks already reuse substantial volumes of slag and other process materials, and higher-value outlets can reduce disposal requirements while replacing some virgin material in downstream applications. Executing the work while Middletown remains in production will create a separate engineering challenge. An integrated steel plant depends on continuous flows of ore, coke, molten iron, gases, water, power, semi-finished steel, and finished product, so major construction and furnace work must be coordinated with outages and temporary production arrangements. The blast-furnace rebuild itself represents one of the plant's most consequential maintenance cycles. Furnaces operate in campaigns lasting many years, and a major rebuild provides an opportunity to renew refractory systems, cooling, instrumentation, materials handling, and auxiliary equipment that would be difficult to replace during ordinary operation. More than 1,500 construction workers are expected at the programme's peak, while the Department of Energy says the investment supports approximately 2,300 existing jobs at Middletown Works. Those numbers reflect both the scale of the construction programme and the importance of maintaining the plant as an operating integrated steel producer. The project also illustrates the commercial constraint surrounding more fundamental changes to primary steelmaking. Alternative routes can require new furnaces, electricity supply, hydrogen or gas infrastructure, raw-material specifications, and downstream adjustments, all of which add capital and operating costs before a tonne of saleable steel reaches the customer. Where buyers will not absorb that additional cost, producers are left balancing decarbonisation ambitions against the economics of existing plants. Cleveland-Cliffs and the Department of Energy have chosen a programme built around efficiency, energy recovery, process control, and asset renewal rather than forcing an investment model the company says its customers would not support. Middletown Works will remain a blast-furnace operation after the programme is complete, but it should not be the same blast-furnace operation. The useful measures will be fuel consumption, yield, energy recovery, reliability, production cost, and quality once the rebuilt furnace and supporting systems are operating - rather than how much artificial intelligence appears in the project description. Stories for you. * Shanghai Electric supplies record biomethanol bunkering Shanghai Electric has supplied a record 8,000-tonne biomethanol bunkering operation. The delivery links large-scale fuel production in Jilin with storage, transport, and marine bunkering at Shanghai. * Ursa Major opens Colorado aerospace manufacturing plant Ursa Major has opened a new Colorado aerospace manufacturing plant. The Longmont facility expands avionics, propulsion, cleanroom, welding, and environmental-test capacity while releasing additional production space elsewhere.

Cliffs announces blast furnace investment. The iron mining and steelmaking company may tap into federal funding to repurpose blast furnace heat into an energy source in Ohio. Published August 23, 2026 Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. has announced it has made progress on an arrangement to use $500 million in United States Department of Energy (DOE) funding to introduce energy-related technology to its blast furnace/basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steel mill in Middletown, Ohio. The Cleveland-based iron mining and steel production firm says the planned "optimization project" represents a $1 billion total investment in Middletown, with funding shared equally between Cleveland-Cliffs and the DOE. The planned investment includes upgrades to or a rebuild of a blast furnace, plus "advanced material handling infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled process control technologies." Cliffs describes one component of the project as involving the construction of a cogeneration facility that will capture and use blast furnace gas to generate electricity and steam for on-site consumption at the mill. "This will improve overall energy efficiency, reduce reliance on externally supplied electricity and lower operating costs," says Cliffs, saying completion of the blast furnace rebuild is planned for the first quarter of 2030. Cliffs says the project and its DOE funding is tied to "rescoping the previously awarded $500 million DOE grant." That appears to be a reference to a 2024 grant announcement tied to electrification of its melt shop capacity and turning away from the use of coke and coal in favor of direct reduced iron (DRI) and other iron units sometimes referred to as scrap alternatives. In 2023, the company was exploring the use of hydrogen energy at its blast furnace/BOF mills, with Cliffs president and CEO Lourenco Goncalves stating, "With clean hydrogen in our backyard, Cliffs' hydrogen-ready blast furnaces and direct reduction plant will be the first in the world to replace CO[2] with a new byproduct that does not contribute to global warming: This new byproduct will be H20." Three years later, Goncalves remarks, "The DOE's support for this project is a testament to the importance of preserving the blast furnace route to produce automotive-exposed grade steels in the U.S., while advancing American energy dominance." The DOE grant "rescoping" is being criticized by several not-for-profit organizations, who see the pivot from hydrogen-powered DRI to coal-fired blast furnace production as potentially yielding increased CO[2] emissions. "Middletown Works was promised the opportunity to become a global leader in clean steelmaking; instead, the plant is receiving huge federal incentives to save the company money without meaningfully reducing pollution," says Hilary Lewis of Cincinnati-based Industrious Labs. "Clean steel is the future, both for Cleveland-Cliffs and the world, but instead of building a better, healthier future, the Trump administration is trying to tie this facility to technology from a century ago," says Ian Wells of the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Sponsored Content Optimal productivity, heavy construction, safety features and operator comfort come together in the SENNEBOGEN 360 G-series telescopic wheel loader, designed for work across the waste and recycling industry. Telescopic wheel loaders manufactured by SENNEBOGEN have a growing presence at transfer stations, material recovery facilities (MRFs), construction and demolition (C&D) recycling plants and metal recycling facilities across North America. Also expressing criticism of the DOE grant "rescoping" have been the California-based Sierra Club and Washington-based Mighty Earth. Get curated news on YOUR industry. Enter your email to receive our newsletters.