Thyssenkrupp Steel USA and ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA began construction in early November on a new $3.7-billion, 3,500-acre carbon and stainless steel processing facility in Calvert, Ala. Ekkehard D. Schulz, chairman of the executive board of parent ThyssenKrupp in Duisberg, Germany, expects the plant to be operational in March 2010.

ThyssenKrupp's Alabama facility will include a hot strip mill that will be used primarily to process slabs from ThyssenKrupp's new steel plant in Brazil. The facility will also feature cold rolling and hot-dip coating capacities for high-quality end products of flat carbon steel. The facility will have an annual capacity of 4.1 million metric tons of carbon steel end products.

The Alabama facility will also incorporate stainless steel melt shop with an annual capacity of up to one million metric tons of slabs; these slabs will also be processed on the hot strip mill. A cold rolling facility is to be built, which will be designed initially to produce 350,000 tons of cold strip and 125,000 tons of pickled hot strip. The stainless steel plant will provide ThyssenKrupp Mexinox in San Luis Potosi (Mexico) with its requirements of 340,000 metric tons/year of hot band.