Additional blast furnace to come back online, Essar tells city

Sault Ste. Marie’s largest single employer says it plans to add hundreds of jobs within the next few months as it hopes to bring an additional blast furnace back into service.

Essar Steel Algoma President and CEO Kalyan Ghosh has written a letter to the Mayor Christian Provenzano requesting the city make a complimentary investment of $1-million dollars in return for “sizeable economic benefits” the company said will result.

The money will be used to bring a mothballed blast furnaces back into service.

“In order to secure our competitive market position and meet the evolving product needs of our customers, our analysis shows we need to start-up No. 6 Blast Furnace by November 2015,” said Ghosh in the letter.

The request is featured on next week’s city council agenda and will be addressed at that time.

A restart of the company’s No. 6 blast furnace would increase hot metal production by one million tons and add “upwards of” 200 new jobs at the plant.

Blast furnace No. 7, currently the local steelmaker’s only operational blast furnace, has a capacity of 2.8 million tons.

Idle for more than a decade, the smaller secondary blast furnace was restarted briefly in 2008 after a $40-million rebuild.

The company plans to hire more than 200 additional personnel by April to have them trained and ready for when the furnace comes back online, and says the move would translate into an additional 750 or more job in manufacturing and services industry.