And the Winner is....Alabama
05/11/2007 - ThyssenKrupp has selected Alabama as the home for its new state-of-the-art steel and stainless steel processing facility.
ThyssenKrupp has selected Alabama as the home for its new state-of-the-art steel and stainless steel processing facility. The facility, a cooperative effort between ThyssenKrupp Steel and ThyssenKrupp Stainless, will be located in Northern Mobile and Southern Washington counties. The decision was approved earlier today by ThyssenKrupp AG's Supervisory Board during its meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany.
ThyssenKrupp also announced that it will now invest $3.7 billion in the facility, with steel and stainless steel capacity upgrades accounting for the bulk of the increase over the group’s $2.9-billion initial plan. Plans also call for the installation of additional equipment that will facilitate further diversification of the facility’s product portfolio.
The company says its decision to select Alabama was based on the same criteria used for the site selection process, with decisive factors including logistical considerations (for the entire supply chain, from Brazil to the projected customers) as well as such operating costs as electricity and water, and site-specific capital expenditures.
The carbon steel portion of the new facility will have an annual capacity of 4.1 million tonnes of carbon steel end products, and will include a hot strip mill to process slabs from the ThyssenKrupp's new steel plant in Brazil. It will also feature cold rolling and hot-dip coating capacity for high-quality end products of flat carbon steel.
The new facility will also include a stainless steel meltshop with an annual capacity of up to one million tonnes of slabs, which will be also processed on the hot strip mill. The facility will also feature a cold rolling mill that will be designed initially to produce 350,000 tons of cold strip and 125,000 tons of pickled hot strip. The stainless plant will provide ThyssenKrupp Mexinox in San Luis Potosi (Mexico) with its required pre-material — 340,000 tonnes of hot band.
ThyssenKrupp’s work to select a location for the new facility, including extensive due diligence and negotiations, began in February 2006 with 67 potential sites in 20 states. From the initial sites, ThyssenKrupp confined its search to locations in three states: Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana, with the field further narrowed to just Alabama and Louisiana in February of this year.
Scheduled to begin operations in 2010, the new plant complex is expected to be one of the largest private industrial development projects in the United States over the next decade. During the construction phase, approximately 29,000 jobs will be generated, and tens of thousands of indirect jobs are expected to be generated over a 20-year time period. When fully operational, the plant will employ 2700 people.
