Sep. 24—Manufacturing is on the upswing in Terre Haute and Vigo County as some companies expanded employment and facilities in 2021.

Two companies — Novelis and Steel Dynamics — each announced large investments in their manufacturing facilities.

For more than 60 years, Novelis has been a mainstay of manufacturing in Terre Haute.

This year, the company brought a return of its production of household aluminum foil, restarting several pieces of idled equipment at its manufacturing plant at 5901 N 13th St. in Terre Haute, committing $7 million to hire 37 new employees. The company in mid-August had 167 employees.

One reason for the return of foil production are multi-year agreements with customers, including "one of the top household foil businesses in the United States," said Ryan Smith, plant manager.

"It puts our equipment back into use and generates jobs locally ... and (it) solidifies that the company is willing to invest in the great people here," Smith said. "That kind of investments shows that we are here for a long time."

Novelis first began as Anaconda in 1959 as a fully integrated aluminum sheet and extrusion plant. The extrusion section was shut down in the 1960s and foil products were added.

In 1977, the plant was bought by Arco (Atlantic Richfield Company). The facility then was purchased by Alcan in 1985, which moved the plant into a facility that specialized in light gauge rolled products. In 1988, the company invested about $90 million to install rolling mills, automated cranes and annealing furnaces.

The move reduced the plant's employment from about 1,200 workers down to about 250 employees as automation and cranes reduced the number of workers needed, said Kim Marlow, human resources manager for Novelis.

In the 1990s, the Terre Haute plant achieved the status of world-class foil plant and a leader in the production of rigid foil container stock, package foil and supplier of wide industrial foil. In 2001, new household aluminum foil mills were added.

In 2005, the facility was spun off as a standalone company named Novelis. In 2007, Novelis was bought by India-based Aditya Birla Group becoming Aditya Birla Novelis. In 2008, total shipments reached 10 billion pounds.

Foil production was halted in 2014 due to import market dynamics.

Since then, the U.S. Aluminum Association's Trade Enforcement Working Group, which includes Novelis, has filed antidumping and countervailing duty petitions against several countries where unfairly priced aluminum foil has been imported.

Antidumping duties are now collected on imported aluminum foil from Russia, Brazil, Armenia and Oman after a U.S Department of Commerce investigation determined sales in the U.S. were less than normal value. The Department of Commerce began its investigation in October, 2020, investigating imports from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020.

"Findings confirm that producers in Armenia, Brazil, Oman and Russia relied on artificially low prices to increase rapidly aluminum foil exports to the United States, as unfairly traded imports from China withdrew from the market in connection with prior trade enforcement actions," Tom Dobbins, CEO of the Aluminum Association, said in a statement.

Glad to be back

Todd Kinnett, 49, of Terre Haute has worked 20 years at the Terre Haute plant. This year he returned to household foil as a foil mill operator.

"I am glad to see it come back. I am very glad," Kinnett said. "I was one of the first people to be qualified on this mill in 2001 and I was one of the last people to be (taken) off that mill when they shut it down."

"It seemed like I was gone a long time, but once I got back to over there and started looking around, it kind of feels like I never left, just took a long nap and woke up and I was still there," Kinnett said.

"It is a challenging job and takes a lot of skill to run the mill, but we had a lot of guys when I came here who had run the mill for a long time," Kinnett said. "They were good at their job and were able to teach me how to do it."

The plant is a cold-roll mill, meaning aluminum is rolled to thinner gauges. A doubling mill, which has two sheets of aluminum go through the mill at the same time, is used to make household foil, he said.

"When those two sheets go together, we spray what is called a matte oil (used when pressing the aluminum through rollers that flatten it) so that is where one side of the aluminum foil has a shiny side and one has a dull side," Kinnett said.

"The sheets are too thin to take down to one sheet, so you have use two sheets" to make the foil, he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for aluminum over the past two years, Smith said. The rolled aluminum at the plant is also sold to companies that produce aluminum containers, such as turkey pans, pie pans and baking sheets, as well as take-out food containers.

Novelis holds about 60 percent market share in the United States on aluminum and claims to be the world's largest aluminum recycler.

"Aluminum is infinitely recyclable. We recycle 100 percent of our aluminum," Smith said, including closed-loop recycling streams, a process where the metal is collected, recycled and used again to make the same product.

Smith, a 2003 graduate of Indiana State University, returned to Terre Haute in July, from North Carolina, to head the Novelis facility. He had been operations/plant manager of Kellogg's in Seelyville, until their shutdown in 2017. Hearthside Food Solutions LLC then bought that plant in 2018.

Novelis has many strengths, Smith said, especially its employees.

"The great thing about this plant is the workforce. It is a great workforce," Smith said. "People are eager to advance. I never worked in a facility where I have met so many people who started off at an entry level job that are now engineers. They see the opportunity for advancement and go back to school," he said, adding Novelis pays for workers to obtain a degree.

"It is not just a handful (of workers), it is significant," Smith said.

"We are from a compensation standpoint, we stand out in Terre Haute, Vigo County and surrounding communities," Smith said.

Marlow said everyone who starts at the Terre Haute plant as a production worker begins at $21.65 an hour.

"There will be the opportunity to increase pay because of job bids for specific equipment we are trying to start back up," Marlow said. "Pay for automations are more than mechanical or process" workers she said.

And workers can earn $80,000 to $100,000 annually if they chose, Marlow said, as the company pays 1 1/2 times on Saturday and double time on Sundays. Additionally, engineers are paid more than $100,000.

The company is adding operators, mechanics, electricians and engineers under its new household foil production.

Marlow said that "once people come here, they typically don't leave," Marlow said.

Kinnett agreed.

"This place has employed a lot of people ... and to be here over 60 years and doing the same thing, that is a rarity in the Midwest. It has been a good job. I have no complaints," Kinnett said.

Steel Dynamics

In September, the Vigo County Council approved a full-10 year tax abatement for Steel Dynamics Heartland LLC for a $231 million project that will add 84 workers.

The Vigo County abatement will save the company about $25.4 million in taxes over 10 years, with about $16.9 million in taxes on new equipment and $8.5 million in taxes on its proposed new production building.

Steel Dynamics intends to construct a 390,000-square-foot building at cost of $34.65 million and install $196.35 million in new equipment.

The new equipment includes adding a galvanizing line and paint line, cranes, water treatment equipment, rail and scrap yard, plus mobile equipment and coil handling equipment.

The expansion will take about two years to complete, with the first cold steel roll in production by the second half of 2023, said Roberto Bohrer, operations manager for the Terre Haute. The project will require 500 construction jobs at its peak, he said.

The additional 84 Steel Dynamics workers are to be paid an average $80,000 a year in salaries, according to Steel Dynamics.

Additionally, the company, located at 455 W. Industrial Drive, is to retain 226 employees with annual salary at $21.6 million. Those jobs have an average annual wage of $95,575, according to the tax abatement filing before the County Council.

Of those workers, 51 percent are from Vigo County, with the next highest group, at 21 percent, is from Sullivan County.

Bohrer said Steel Dynamics uses United Steel Supply to distribute its steel coils. United Steel Supply company could build a distribution facility next to the Terre Haute's plant expansion, Bohrer said.

In 2019, Steel Dynamics purchased 75 percent of the equity interests of the Austin-Texas based United Steel Supply for $134 million, with an option to purchase the remaining 25 percent of equity interest in the future.

United Steel Supply is a distributor of painted flat roll steel used for roofing and siding applications. The Terre Haute expansion would produce the roll steel used for roofing and siding, Bohrer told the County Council..

Steel Dynamics, Bohrer said, spends on average $2.3 million annually with companies in Vigo County for services to its plant, and the company pays about $1 million annually in local taxes.

The cold roll mill has been operating in the Vigo County Industrial Park for more than two decades. The business began as Heartland Steel, which opened an 80,000 square foot facility in June, 1998.

In 2001, Heartland Steel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In the same year, Brazilian-based Companhia Sidenrurgica Nacional (CSN) bought the mill, with an annual capability to produce 1 million tons of cold-rolled steel, with galvanizing capacity of 360,000 tons, for $50 million.

Steel Dynamics purchased the steel plant from CSN in 2018 for $400 million.

Since Steel Dynamics' founding in Fort Wayne in 1993, the company has grown to more than $9 billion in annual revenue and total employment of nearly 10,000.

Reporter Howard Greninger can be reached 812-231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com. Follow on Twitter@TribStarHoward.