Remake steel from the fallen Key Bridge to build the new one
When President Biden visits the Port of Baltimore on Friday, he and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore should announce that steel from the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge will be recycled into the bones of a replacement span over the Patapsco River.
Such a goal would be as practical as it would be symbolic because melting scrap into new steel is, more than ever, a major practice inside U.S. mills.
Had things been different — had the nearby Sparrows Point mills been modernized years ago, had they continued to exist and produce steel — it’s possible the bones of the new bridge would come from the plant on its northeastern shore.
And that would have been cool. But the Bethlehem Steel plant, once the world’s largest, is long gone — rendered obsolete, erased and transformed into Tradepoint Atlantic — and the steel industry has changed significantly from its blast-furnace heyday.
In fact, there’s been a long shift away from large mills like the ones at Sparrows Point, known as “integrated mills” that made steel from scratch, using iron ore, coal and limestone.
The dominant way Americans make steel now is with electric arc furnaces (EAFs) that use electrical currents to melt scrap steel and other recycled metals. About 100 plants with that technology are scattered across the country; they melt down millions of tons of domestic scrap to make new products.
“Over 70% of all the steel produced in the United States is produced in a modern sustainable way, via the electric arc furnace,” says Philip K. Bell, president of the Steel Manufacturers Association, which represents EAF companies. “They use recycled steel.”
With the salvage operation now underway in the Patapsco, Bell says the girders and beams from the Key Bridge are destined to be recycled.
“A lot of the steel being salvaged could be repurposed to make more steel that might ultimately end up in the new bridge,” he says. “And the steel industry has plenty of domestic steel-making capacity so that this [new] bridge can be built with steel made by Americans.”
Bell mentioned mills in New Jersey and Virginia that use EAFs to make the kind of structural steel needed for a bridge. Other plants in the southeastern U.S. make the steel used to reinforce concrete.
Federal law requires that steel used in federally funded highway projects be domestically manufactured, and the Key Bridge should fall into that category.
“There’s plenty of sustainable, domestically made steel available to rebuild that bridge,” Bell says. “When you look at construction projects or infrastructure, things like bridges or roads, the overwhelming majority of that steel is made via the electric arc furnace.”
It’s a typically greener process, too.
“In general,” says a 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service, “the [EAF mills] now used in more than two-thirds of U.S. steel production have lower carbon dioxide emissions per ton than integrated mills. Collecting and transporting steel scrap for use in an EAF is likely to involve lower emissions per ton of steel than mining, transporting, and processing iron ore for use in an integrated steel mill.”
Steelmaking was a huge presence in Baltimore for more than a century — Bethlehem Steel employed 30,000 workers in the late 1950s — but it’s been gone so long now that a Baltimorean can be forgiven for thinking that the entire industry moved overseas.
A lot of it did, of course. China has been the big dog in global manufacturing for years, accounting in 2020 for nearly 60% of all steel output.
But, despite decades of decline — and with the help of protectionist laws and tariffs on imports — the U.S. steel industry is still the fourth-leading producer in the world, according to the CRS. Its report to Congress says that, depending on demand, U.S.-based companies provide anywhere from 70 to 90% of all the steel needed for domestic manufacturing (cars, appliances, etc.) and construction (buildings, highways, bridges).
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 317,000 people are employed by U.S. iron and steel mills and steel product manufacturing.
The CRS says U.S. mills operated at 81% of their capacity in 2021, a highly profitable year for steel companies. Coming out of the pandemic, domestic use of steel reached 98 million metric tons.
But Bell of the SMA says plants are presently running at lower capacity. “Capacity utilization is running in the mid-70% range,” he says. “That’s not bad, but it’s not optimal. Optimally, most mills need to be running at about 80 to 85% capacity.”
Industry analysts expect a big boost from two of the major spending bills that were pushed by the Biden administration, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). I’m sure we’ll be hearing about that from the president.
But while Biden is here, he and Moore could throw in that bit — and it’s no small bit — about turning the wreckage of the first Key Bridge into a second one. We could use a little positive symbolism around here.
“The sections of the bridge that fell into the harbor will ultimately be shredded and remelted and made into other steel products,” says Bell. “So sections of that [fallen] bridge could conceivably appear back in that [new] bridge at some point.”
Or in the electric cars we drive over it.