“Completion of this outage helps position us to serve our customers’ needs for years to come,” James Wainscott, chairman, president and chief executive officer of AK Steel, said in a statement.
The Ashland outage had been planned to occur in 2015, but was advanced to address operational issues that began earlier this year, the company said.
AK Steel's blast furnace in Ashland unexpectedly shut down twice this year due to some kind of malfunction or incident, according to company disclosures. It happened first in February, and again in July.
The blast furnace is the part of the mill where fuel, iron ore and limestone are heated and reduced to make hot metal. AK Steel has three blast furnaces — the one at Ashland, one at Middletown Works in Butler County, and one in Dearborn, Mich., that was acquired earlier this year.
Other steel plants operated by AK Steel use electric arc furnaces, which consume scrap steel and heats it with an electrical charge to mold metal.
At the time it was announced that AK Steel planned to take Ashland Works' blast furnace offline for repairs, company spokesman Mike Wallner said all carbon steel slabs produced at Ashland get rolled at Middletown Works. He said while the Kentucky blast furnace was shut down, the company planned to use the hot mill at Middletown Works to roll additional carbon steel slabs purchased on the open market.
One of the Cincinnati-Dayton region’s largest publicly-held companies, West Chester Twp.-based AK Steel employs approximately 2,400 full-time workers in Butler County between headquarter operations and the Middletown Works steel plant. AK Steel facilities in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Minnesota employ approximately 8,000 and produce flat-rolled carbon, electrical and stainless steels used by the automotive, appliance, construction and manufacturing markets.
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