teel Dynamics Inc. is well along its timeline for executing a plan, announced in early 2019, to open a 3 million-tons-per-year minimill in Sinton, Texas, a town with roughly 5,600 residents who enjoy a warm climate with average annual rainfall of 34 inches.
The location’s advantages are obvious. It’s 30 minutes from the Port of Corpus Christi, which serves other nearby steel-related interests in addition to oil and chemical companies. It’s 150 miles from Nuevo Laredo and 170 miles from Matamoros. Apart from SDI’s Omnisource scrapyards, the steelmaker will source scrap from a new acquisition, Zimmer Recycling, just outside Monterrey.
“It’s a big project and we’re completing it in the middle of a pandemic,” comments Glenn Pushis, senior vice president for special projects at SDI. The company broke ground last year and expects to start up production in 2021. “Building a steel mill in 18 months is super aggressive,” he acknowledges.
“The shop is laid out to feed a slab caster. Single slabs will be up to 5.5 inches thick and up to 84 inches wide,” Pushis says, adding that casting speed can reach 6 meters per minute.

A continuous pickle line will accept coils from 38 to 78 inches wide and from 0.047 inch to 0.25 inch thick. The line can pickle coils at up to 820 feet per minute. Its annual capacity is rated at 1.1 million tons. SDI Sinton is installing a continuous tandem cold mill—five stand/six high; its annual capacity is 850,000 tons. Cold rolling speed will reach up to 3,969 feet per minute, according to the specifications.
“The hot rolling mill is a conventional style,” says Pushis. “It has a two-stand roughing mill with edging capability. That feeds into a six-stand finishing mill, then into two down coilers. The layout of the hot mill is designed for thermal mechanical rolling so we are able to produce advanced high-strength automotive steels and API grades.
“We go through the hot mill, then the pickle line and tandem cold mill. That facility can run straight through, or we can run the hot side and cold mill independently.” SDI can store hot band coil or take material off the pickle line and later reinsert that steel into the cold mill.


From there, SDI is installing annealing capacity. Using 100 percent hydrogen, the Ebner furnaces manage coils of cold-rolled strip. “We have 12 furnace bases and we have room to expand to 24 bases,” says Pushis. Sinton’s annual annealing capacity is 250,000 tons.
“From there we have a single-stand, high-powered temper mill for fully processed cold-rolled products. The temper mill can go to 84 inches wide,” he says, and can temper 440,000 tons per year.
Finally, Danieli & C. Officine Meccaniche S.p.A. will install a 250,000-ton continuous paint line that can double coat or coat both sides of the strip. The line will accept coils from 36 to 72 inches wide, up to 32 tons. The paint line will coat pickled hot strip, cold-rolled, galvanized and Galvalume up to 0.076 inch thick.

“The keys to this facility are the thermal mechanical rolling, the layout of the hot mill and the cold mill, heat treating as you are rolling, and quick quenching.” It even comes down to spacing out the cooling beds. “This is all highly engineered and important.”
Efficiency is a constant goal. “You can have a coil in two weeks. If you are talking about a standard product, that can come off the line quickly,” Pushis says. Custom gauges or custom colors will mean longer lead times.

Omnisource is working now to arrange consistent scrap sourcing for the Sinton mill. “And we just purchased Zimmer. That’s 500,000 tons coming through Laredo for this facility. So we have the [raw material] sources.
“We have a good supply of power. We have access to water—we are sitting on a water main that feeds the entire city of Corpus Christi,” Pushis says. “We have three Class I railroads—Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Kansas City Southern. We have good road and highway infrastructure.”
SDI can affordably access Laredo and Brownsville, leading to the manufacturing center of Monterrey. Trucks and trains can “get quickly to the West Coast and our freight rate will be much better than from Gary.”
Most of the toll processing will be slitting, leveling and cut to length.
Sinton, Texas, 361/424-6222, steeldynamics.com.