Post-1965 greenfield steel mills

Burns Harbor as the last green-field steel mill built in the U.S., framing the magnitude of capital investment required for primary materials production and why only nation-states (not companies) now build them.

It has to do with what part of the steel mill it comes out of. Steel mills are huge. Even now, after forty years, whenever I walk through a steel plant I'm still amazed by the magnitude of it. The last steel mill built on a green-field site in this country was built by Bethlehem Steel — world's second-largest steel company at the time — Burns Harbor, Indiana. Now I think it's owned by ArcelorMittal. But that was in 1965. Fifty years ago. Bethlehem Steel paid about five billion dollars in '65, which would be fifteen or twenty billion today. Since then, plenty of new steel mills have been built in the world, because countries will build a steel mill — it's so important for their economy. What was one of the first things the Japanese did after World War II? They built steel mills, because they needed to build ships. That was part of their tradition and their culture — they're surrounded by water. But since Burns Harbor, no company has built a steel mill. Only countries have invested in them, because the investment is so big. The only people who can afford twenty-billion-dollar investments in manufacturing capacity today are Intel and Boeing. A new state-of-the-art semiconductor fab is twenty billion. A new commercial 777 or 787 — twenty billion. It's a bet-your-company business; you'll go bankrupt if you invest in it.

Roughly a dozen built worldwide since 1965; none by a shareholder-funded company. Sets up the $1B-investment threshold argument that Boeing (Dreamliner, $20B), Intel ($1B+ fab) can clear but most companies cannot.

Let me finish that story. We've had new steel mills built since 1965. POSCO, the world's largest steel company, in Pohang, Korea, built a steel mill in the 1970s. But POSCO Steel was not bankrolled by financial people — it was bankrolled by the Korean government. There have been probably a dozen steel mills built in the world since 1965 on greenfield sites, but not a single one has been built by a company that was risking shareholder money. It was countries who built a steel mill because they saw steel as vital to the growth of their nation.