Speaking during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Cleveland-Cliffs chairman, president and chief executive Lourenco Goncalves said the company is restarting Cleveland’s No. 6 furnace to compensate for production that will be lost during a 45-day outage of its Middletown Works blast furnace.

Afterward, the company will turn its attention to the No. 7 furnace at Indiana Harbor, he said. The company did not say when the outage will take place. 

The Indiana Harbor and Cleveland furnaces were acquired through the company’s purchase of ArcelorMittal USA’s integrated assets. The acquisition closed in December, and the company is continuing to integrate the ArcelorMittal mills into its operations. 

Goncalves said Cleveland-Cliffs has 10 blast furnaces in its roster of operating assets. He said he envisions that six to eight of those will be producing at any given time, giving the company a high degree of flexibility in responding to market conditions and to maintenance needs without impacting customers.

He said that as Cleveland-Cliffs brings the ArcelorMittal assets and people into the fold, he is seeing tremendous buy-in from the former Arcelor-Mittal employees.  

“It’s fair to say that the entire workforce … all recognize that Cleveland-Cliffs’ unique business model is now envy of the steel industry, and they seem to be proud of that,” he said. 

Also during the call, Goncalves said the company is continuing to ramp up its new gas-fired direct reduction plant in Toledo, Ohio. He said the plant is producing hot briquetted iron to fulfill internal needs now, but will begin shipping to outside customers next month.