The neighboring company to Granite City’s steel mill that floated purchasing both blast furnaces back in 2022 still plans to forge ahead with its plans that union officials say would leave only a few hundred permanent jobs.
With President Donald Trump approving the deal between U.S. Steel and the Japanese firm Nippon late last week, a representative for SunCoke Energy Inc. confirmed the Chicago-area company wants to repurpose the Metro East blast furnaces into granulators that would melt iron to fuel other electric furnaces — and shut down steelmaking.
“We still plan to pursue the Granulated Pig Iron project at Granite City,” Shantanu Agrawal, vice president of finance and treasurer of SunCoke Energy, wrote in an email on Monday.
While the latest development doesn’t come as a surprise, SunCoke’s continued interest marks another chapter in the saga as steelworkers in Granite City and local leaders await final word on the future of a vital industry in the Metro East community.
However, it remains unclear if U.S. Steel, which currently owns Granite City Works, or Nippon have any appetite to complete the deal in Granite City. Agrawal said SunCoke hasn’t had any conversations with either company recently, as the two steel giants hashed out a $14.9 billion merger.
Neither Nippon nor U.S. Steel has responded to repeated requests for comment about the future of steelmaking in Granite City.
If the local deal goes through with SunCoke, an estimated 500 jobs would remain in Granite City, said Craig McKey, president of United Steelworkers Local 1899.
“I anticipate we could lose 400 to 500 more jobs if that deal happens over the next two years,” McKey said.
Those figures may not appear as drastic as when the deal was first proposed because there are fewer people working at the plant, McKey said. With both blast furnaces idled, fewer than 900 employees have been working at the mill recently.
When SunCoke and U.S. Steel first proposed the deal in 2022, the union warned it could mean the permanent loss of 1,000 jobs. At the time, only one blast furnace had been idled, and about 1,500 people worked at Granite City Works. U.S. Steel shut the second furnace down in 2023.
SunCoke’s commitment to the deal for Granite City’s blast furnaces comes at a time when the company appears to be doubling down on steelmaking efforts. The Lisle, Illinois-based firm recently acquired Phoenix Global, a company that specializes in recovering and processing scrap metal, for $325 million.
That and SunCoke planning to make some additional investments at their facility in Granite City had led McKey to believe the company still wanted to make the deal.
“I’m hoping I’m wrong,” he said.
However, if the deal goes through, it may not be the worst news, McKey said. When SunCoke and U.S. Steel first laid out plans to buy and sell the blast furnaces, the two firms made plans to make steel during the transition.
“There would be a potential that they may make steel up until the granulators are built and ready to run,” McKey said.
While not ideal for union membership, making steel for a couple of years would provide some temporary job opportunities. Regardless, the lack of clarity in Granite City has been terrible for its employees over the last couple of years, McKey said.
“I think my membership, and myself included, are just tired of this stressful up and down — hey, what in the heck is going to happen to us?” he said.
There is hope that the local union will learn its fate in the coming days. It’s expected that all the U.S. Steel stock will be completely purchased by Nippon on Wednesday, meaning leadership at the companies may finally make plans for the Metro East mill public.
At this point, there’s a feeling local plant managers remain hopeful Nippon may start up the blast furnaces again or even build granulators themselves, McKey said.
“Even before we know what our ultimate future is going to be, it's a sigh of relief,” he said of the deal coming to a close, “just because we know at least the Nippon saga is behind us, and that sometime, relatively in the near future, we're going to understand what it is we're going to be asked to do here in Granite.”
