A bar of steel makes its way through the 80-inch hot strip mill on its way to becoming a coil of steel.
Gary Works is shown.
An steelworker uses a crane to move an order of steel in the slab yard at Plant 2 at a East Chicago steel mill in 2017.
Gary Works is shown.
Alliance Steel is moving from Illinois to Gary.
A train hauls steel through downtown Gary.
Great Lakes steel production dipped by 2,000 tons, while steel capacity utilization slipped again last week, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Locally, steel mills in the Great Lakes region, clustered mainly along the south shore of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, made 557,000 tons of metal in the week that ended Saturday, down from 559,000 tons the previous week.
Steel mills remained well below 80% capacity, a key threshold they operated at for most of last year, following the latest wave of industry consolidation, imposition of blanket tariffs of 25%, strong demand and generally favorable market conditions. Imports have been rising again after steel prices soared to record highs, though prices have since cooled off.
Overall, domestic steel mills made 1.614 million tons of steel last week, down 0.8% from 1.627 million tons the previous week and down 8.7% compared to 1.768 million tons the same time a year prior.
Nationally, steel production in 2022 totals 87.605 million tons, a 5.6% decrease from the 92.809 million tons manufactured through the same period last year.
U.S. steel mills have run at a capacity utilization rate of 78% through Saturday, down from 81.2% at the same point in 2021, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Steel capacity utilization, a key metric of the industry's profitability, was 72.3% last week, down from 80.1% a year earlier and down from 72.9% the week prior.
Steel production in the southern region, which encompasses many mini-mills and rivals the Great Lakes region in output, totaled 670,000 tons last week, down from 674,000 tons the week before, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Volume in the rest of the Midwest dipped to 197,000 tons, down from 200,000 tons the week prior.
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