[TheForge] Metal Prices!
ries
ries at riesniemi.com
Sun Jun 20 19:45:43 EDT 2010
On Jun 20, 2010, at 2:25 PM, Jerry Smith wrote:
Ries,
I agree with you on most of this. The old mills here in the Ohio
Valley, that is Ohio and West Virginia as junkyards or empty these
days. The foreign companies are now selling these old mills, to who I
don't know.
Out in the shop I do have Nucor steel, but I also have some Nippon,
plus Hitachi steel and some stuff from a value added company, so I
don't know where the original steel came from.
Can Nucor supply the volume of steel that it took to win WW II and the
post war era, that is the key to the whole situation. That ability and
potential is what made America great.
With automation and better control systems, you can make just about
anything better, it's getting the people and politicians to upgrade.
Jerry
Jerry- the volume of steel it took to win WW II was about 400 million
tons, spread out over 5 years- at least, those are the figures I can
find online.
So, yes, we, as a country are totally able to make that much steel
domestically. That would average to about 100 million tons a year.
Which we did make in 2007.
Our mills are currently not running at full capacity, but I would
imagine that, if needed, we could make MORE than that with current US
capacity.
Of course, the steel needed to win WWII is kind of meaningless-
consider the fact that right now, we spend more on our military than
the top 5 other countries combined, and have the biggest, baddest
military in the history of the world- and most of it doesnt use much
steel.
When you have stealth bombers and laser guided missiles and Apache
helicopters, just making more steel doesnt matter as much.
But if you look at the size of the population today, about 300 million
people, versus WW 2, at about 130 million people, we need, use, and
make, more steel today for our everyday civilian uses than we needed
to win WW2. Or at least very close to the same amount.
So our current manufacturing base, including our steel mills, is
probably enough to win a war against most countries. Especially since
we have such an advanced military.
We have an incredible manufacturing capacity in the USA today- in most
categories, we make MORE than we did during WW2. However, we do it
with a fraction of the employees- US steel had 350,000 employees in
the war, we could make more steel today with ten percent, at the very
most, of that many people.
Same thing with cars- probably ten percent as many auto workers make
more cars in america today than it took in 1950.
If for some reason we really needed huge amounts of armaments, we
actually have a lot of CNC shops, auto factories, and the biggest
military manufacturing infrastructure in the history of the world
right now.
What we dont have are huge foundries- we have shipped a lot of that to
China, thats true. Foundries are dirty and smoky, and pollute a lot,
and they are not high profit businesses, so we have lost our capacity
to pour really large stuff.
But most armaments today are carbon fiber and aluminum and titanium,
anyway.
Now if the Martians invaded, and we needed Robt. Heinlein style giant
flying saucers powered by nuclear bombs, then we might be in trouble.
Really, though, our big problem today is jobs- not manufacturing
capacity.
We can make a lot of stuff with a lot fewer folks, and so we have no
jobs, in many parts of the country, even though we make MORE steel,
MORE cars, MORE weapons than 60 years ago.
ries
________________________________
From: ries <ries at riesniemi.com>
To: Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sun, June 20, 2010 5:02:58 PM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Metal Prices!
You guys are a bit confused about this-
First- there are two basic processes used in the USA to make steel-
one is to take iron ore, or taconite, and, using the BOF, create steel
from it.
In this process, for the last 80 years or so, a small percentage of
scrap steel has been mixed in, but the majority of the melt is virgin
ore.
Second- EAF, or Electric Arc Furnaces, are used to melt scrap steel,
which is then tweaked by adding various other metals and chemicals,
and, usually, made into steel using the continuous casting technique.
Nucor, an entirely US owned company, built its first EAF to make steel
from scrap, in Darlington South Carolina, in 1968.
So, for the last 42 years, steel has been made IN THE USA, using 100%
scrap.
The reason chinese steel is bad is not whether or not its made from
scrap- its all in the quality control.
Nucor is now the second largest steel company in the USA, and all
their mills use EAF to make steel from scrap. I would be amazed if any
blacksmith has not ended up with a fair amount of Nucor steel at
various times- it is sold all over the USA.
Its perfectly good stuff.
So making it from scrap has nothing to do with quality.
Nucor will probably make between 20 and 25 million tons of steel this
year, in the USA. They have over 200 facilities, of which something
like 20 are mills, and total employees, for the whole country, are
about 11,000.
In the old days, ONE mill in PA or Ohio would have that many
employees- many would have more.
US Steel, the big, famous company, peaked in its US production at 35
million tons, in 1953, and it took them something like 200,000 workers
to do that.
Nucor is currently running their mills at about 75% capacity.
Its quite possible that Nucor, with its 11,000 employees, could crank
out as much steel today as US Steel did in 53 with 200,000 plus workers.
That has nothing to do with the chinese, or our lack of an industrial
policy, or offshoring manufacturing- its all about automation and
efficiency.
Its a FACT that we are only selling six million tons a year of scrap
to the Chinese.
The chinese make most of their steel from ore, they imported 380
Million tons of ore last year. Much of it from Australia.
They make plenty of their own scrap, believe me- they made 470 million
tons of steel in china in 2007, well over 4 times our production, and
the vast majority of it is used in china- they are building enormous
new dams, bridges, railroads, skyscrapers, stadiums, and more.
We dont make anywhere enough scrap, as a country, to supply China-
there are only 300 million of us, after all.
I still maintain MOST US scrap steel is used in US steel plants to
make steel here.
And we make 80% of our own steel needs here at home.
We dont import that much. 20% or so, and a good piece of that is high
quality stuff from Japan, Germany, and Brazil.
It is absolutely true that the Russians, the Indians, The Germans, and
the Chinese all have been buying steel companies in the USA- but far
from sourcing the steel from outside countries, all of them have been
spending BIllions of dollars to rebuild older US mills, and to build
brand new steel mills in america.
Currently under construction or recently finished in the USA are over
20 billion dollars worth of new steel mills.
Thyssen Krupp, the german company, is right in the middle of a new $5
Billion mill in Alabama.
The Indians are building a couple of new mills in the USA, including a
state of the art Direct Reduction mill in northern Minnesota.
Its a bad thing that our mills are owned by foreigners, but, unlike
american financiers, they are putting their money where their mouth
is, and investing in America. Now, if only we could do that too..
ries
On Jun 20, 2010, at 9:33 AM, Jerry Smith wrote:
John,
I live in steel valley and almost no steel is produced here any more.
Many of the companies in the states are owned by foreign companies and
those companies are building new mill in Mexico to produce steel for
the Mexican auto manufacturing market. Watch the NHK news on PBS you
may find out some interesting things, such as Nippon steel is building
a new mill in Mexico.
China is now producing a record number of I beams and rail road rails
at the moment, as well as building new coal fired electrical plants
something like 1 or 2 going online every month, all for domestic use.
All of these industries take steel and a lot of it.
If China, or Arcelor Mettal or the Russians or many other companies on
the planet are producing lots of steel, where are they getting steel
to recycle from? I already know the answer.
We hear a lot about the industry in the states and the over all
quality of the product, but this is a very large planet in which China
and India are growing incredibily fast and those markets need lots of
product.
I could go on and on, but in the states we are own worst enemies and
steel production in my area has been rock bottom since the late 60s
and early 70s, so people need to look back 40 plus years, not 20 as
some data suggests.
Jerry
________________________________
From: John Allen <countrymetals at gmail.com>
To: Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sun, June 20, 2010 7:51:17 AM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Metal Prices!
US steel is supposedly only to contain a maximum of 25% wrap. China is
more
like 80%. I know when I worked in a large steel supply house, the made
in
China steel ALWAYS cracked or even broke when we bent it. The made in
America stuff was always nice stuff to work with.
The steel yard sent all of their scrap to a large scrap yard, the
biggest
one in NJ and then it got loaded on ship bound for china.
On Jun 18, 2010 11:02 PM, "ries" <ries at riesniemi.com> wrote:
On Jun 18, 2010, at 5:16 PM, Jerry Smith wrote:
Yes I have, but the local scrap yard guys are sell...
Jerry- you sure about that?
The USA, as a whole, makes about half the steel we make from scrap.
Depends on the economy, of course, how much steel we make here in the
USA- before a couple of years ago, when things were booming, we were
making a bit over 100 million tons a year of steel domestically.
Last I heard, these days its more like 80 million tons.
Of those 80 million tons, about half, thats FORTY MILLION TONS of
steel is made right here in the USA from scrap steel.
Nucor likes to keep on hand, at each of its 20 or so mini-mills, about
a million tons of scrap at any given time.
What this means is that our export of scrap to China is a lot less
than the "common wisdom" thinks it is.
In 2009, the best figures I can find indicate we sold about 6 million
tons of scrap to China, the most ever.
So- domestic use of scrap to make new steel-
40 million tons.
export of scrap to China-
6 million tons.
4 times out of 5, your scrap is going to US mills instead of China...
ries
You guys seeing that sort of [extreme] price increases?
Wes (aka William the Tinker)
---...
Ries Niemi
Industrial Artist
http://www.riesniemi.com/
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