Castrip Micro Mill - Benefits Both Customers And The Environment
In Crawfordsville, Indiana, at one of Nucor's environmentally friendly mini mills, sits another modern marvel. It's Nucor's Castrip® Micro Mill and it just might be the most advanced steel plant in the world. We are expanding use of this technology by building our second plant in Blytheville, Arkansas.
Producing what we call Ultra-Thin Cast Steel (UCS), the process instantly transforms molten steel directly into steel sheets in just one remarkable step. Essentially, molten steel enters a pair of twin-roll casters and sheets of solid steel exit the other side.
It's the first flat-rolled product to be direct cast into sheets as thin as 1.4 mm and output at an incredible 0.7 mm. In other words, with Castrip we can deliver a hot-rolled product at cold-rolled gauges. And because the process is so flexible, our minimum-order size requirement is just one 20-ton coil.
As you might imagine, this single-step process dramatically reduces the amount of time, space, energy and manpower needed to produce each coil. In terms of environmental benefits, our Micro Mill consumes 84 percent less energy than a conventional mill with a 75 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. We expanded the use of this technology when we opened our second Castrip facility in Blytheville, Arkansas, in January 2009.