Steel is the clearest case in industry of a technology shift deciding who survives. In 1970 the US steel industry meant integrated mills: blast furnaces making iron from ore and coke, basic oxygen furnaces turning it into steel, and the unions, pensions and towns built around them. By the 2020s most US steel came from electric-arc furnace (EAF) minimills that melt scrap. Nucor led that shift under Ken Iverson, and EAFs make roughly 70% of US output (common estimate, verify against AISI/worldsteel). Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt (15 Oct 2001), the PBGC took its pensions, and three rounds of consolidation followed:
What the study covers
- 1Overview: two technologies, one price
- 2How steel is made
- 3The US industry: Nucor and the minimill revolution
- 4Bethlehem Steel and the integrated collapse
- 5Consolidation: Cleveland-Cliffs and Nippon–U.S. Steel
- 6Section 232 and trade remedies, 2018–26
- 7China, overcapacity and Baowu
- 8Europe: ArcelorMittal, Thyssenkrupp, green steel and CBAM
- 9Aluminium: power is the raw material
- 10Copper and other metals
- 11Scrap: the minimill's commodity
- 12How to read steel and metals claims
- 13Key numbers
- 14Landmark companies and cases
- 15Pitfalls
- 16How an expert thinks about it
- 17Glossary
Technical exhibits
Worked examples, checklists and case studies included with this study.
Minimill vs Blast Furnace Margin Worked Example
Stylized integrated mill vs minimill in $/short ton of HRC: cost build-up; a margin grid by HRC and scrap price; break-even HRC; the crossover scrap price (~$425/st at $105 pellets); utilisation in a downturn; co-moving boom and bust; power and DRI levers; import parity at 0, 25% and 50% tariffs (computed in Python)
Companies in this study
- Nucor
- U.S. Steel
- Cleveland-Cliffs
- Alcoa
- Bethlehem Steel
- ArcelorMittal
- Thyssenkrupp
- Nippon Steel
- China Baowu Steel
- POSCO. For hydrogen and green steel see Energy 10 Hydrogen; for carbon pricing and CBAM see Energy 16 Carbon Markets; for metals as critical minerals see Energy 20 Critical Minerals; for Glencore and Trafigura as metal traders see Energy: Glencore and Energy: Trafigura; for tariff mechanics see Supply chain 19 Tariffs, Customs and Forced-Labour Rules.