Steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs will spend $1 billion to modernize the blast furnace at its Middletown, OH, facility, a total that includes a $500 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant originally intended to support a hydrogen-focused decarbonization project, the company said August 21.
The revised project will reline and upgrade the blast furnace while installing a cogeneration plant for the Middletown site.
“The Middletown blast furnace is due for a reline by 2030, and this DOE grant will allow us to go further in optimizing the furnace and maximizing energy efficiency by capturing and using blast furnace gas to generate electricity on-site,” Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call in July.
The status of the DOE award was put in doubt last year when the Trump administration began a review of clean-energy grants awarded during the Biden administration. Goncalves said in June 2025 that the company was working with the DOE to explore changes to the scope of the project. In the company’s most recent earnings call, Goncalves said the company had made “major progress” on rescoping the project in compliance with the Trump administration’s energy dominance goals.
Under the original project, Cleveland-Cliffs would have replaced the blast furnace with a hydrogen-ready direct reduced iron (DRI) plant and two 120-MW electric melting furnaces (EMF) to feed molten iron to the existing infrastructure already on site.
