EAF mill underway in California

San Diego-based Pacific Steel Group has held a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned recycled-content electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mill in Mojave, California.

An early March LinkedIn post by Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern County (California} Economic Development Corp. refers to the under-construction mill as a 500,000-square-foot micro mill and a $600 million project.

“Today marks a significant economic development milestone for the region,” Chapman writes in his post. “This will be California's first new steel production facility in five decades,” he adds.

The construction of the mill ran into delays that Pacific Steel blamed in part on Texas-based Commercial Metals Co., itself an EAF steel producer and processor of recycled metals.

Last November, a judge ruled in favor of Pacific Steel in a restraint of trade suit it filed against CMC regarding CMC’s claimed exclusive right to purchase steel mill equipment from Italy-based Danieli.

Just five months later, according to the Kern County Economic Development Corp. and local media reports, Pacific Steel is moving ahead with mill construction plans it formulated in 2019 (according to its lawsuit).

An online report by Bakersfield, California-based KGET, the micro mill now under construction will start operating in 2027.

The TV station quotes Pacific Steel Group CEO Eric Benson as saying, “This is a very exciting day for our company. It represents a culmination of nearly five years of work and is the first tangible step toward full vertical integration of our reinforcing steel operations.”

On its website, Pacific Steel Group (no relation to Montana-based Pacific Steel & Recycling) refers to itself as “California’s leading reinforcing steel fabricator.”

Regarding its under-construction mill, the company says it will “be able to locally produce upwards of 450,000 tons of rebar steel, a process that will eliminate approximately 370,000 tons of greenhouse gasses.”

The KGET story refers to California as the world’s fifth largest economy yet being a state that “doesn’t produce a single pound of steel.”

The last steel mill that operated in California was an EAF facility that went through several owners before being purchased by CMC in 2018. CMC idled the facility in 2020 and sold the land on which it sat in 2022.