Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Steel & Aluminum Production


Trump needs to restore steel and aluminum production in the US to satisfy DOD requirements. Trump has proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, but this would discourage our favorite foreign car manufacturers from putting more assembly plants in the US, because the tariff would destroy their ability to buy cheap steel from low wage countries and that would make them uncompetitive. The endgame for Trump is to reduce tariff gouging by other countries and increase US manufacturing. But the steel and aluminum requirements could be an opportunity.

The best way to reduce the cost of producing steel and aluminum in the US is to automate the processes and reduce labor costs to be able to compete with low wage countries who produce steel and aluminum using labor intensive processes.

If automated processes can be used to unload iron ore and transferred to blast furnaces and molten steel can be automatically poured and moved on to cool and then be processed and stacked automatically, this plant could be operated by very few technicians. It would require capital to design and build the tools, but production costs should be lower than more labor intensive methods.

Innovation requires thinking out of the box and reinventing manufacturing processes requires an inventor who is high energy and driven to complete the process reinvention. This inventor needs to be a leader who works 24/7 and will need a team of work animals to help.  It never works in a large bloated bureaucracy.

There are many examples in history about inventers and innovators like Edison, Tesla, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Ford, Oppenheimer Einstein and others. They were “hands-on”, high energy, driven and enjoying it.

Government has always had the right to make what it needs. Trump needs to get the US made steel and aluminum the DOD needs and should fund US manufacturers to reinvent the processes to be able to reduce costs and become competitive with low wage countries.

Steel production in the US would be most efficient if the manufacturing plants were close to the mining operations that extract iron and aluminum ore.

Iron mining in the United States produced 42.5 million metric tons of iron ore in 2015, worth US$3.8 billion.Iron ore was the third-highest-value metal mined in the United States, after gold and copper. Iron ore was mined from nine active mines and three reclamation operations in Michigan, Minnesota, and Utah.

Aluminum production requires bauxite. The United States has small amounts of bauxite ore located in ArkansasAlabama and Georgia. However, very little mining is done in the United States today. Australia, China, and Brazil are the largest producers of bauxite.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader


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