DES MOINES, Iowa — The President of the United States stood on a stretch of flat Midwestern farmland Monday and announced the largest steel plant in the history of the American steel industry, a $15 billion facility that, in the President’s own words, they have “already started building.”
The plant, to be constructed in eastern Iowa by a company called Mesabi Metallics with backing from India’s Essar Group, is expected to cost roughly $15 billion and begin production in 2030, according to a White House official. What it will produce, how much of it, and from what ore, were among the many details the announcement did not cover. What it covered was the fact that Iowa does not currently have a steel industry, has never had a steel industry, and in fact has historically been a state whose primary industrial output is hog bellies and corn starch.
That, officials emphasized, is precisely why Iowa.
“We looked at every state in the union,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to explain why the state with the nation’s second-fewest steelworkers was selected to receive the nation’s largest steel plant. “And Iowa is the state where a $15 billion steel plant makes the most sense. It’s right in the middle. It’s flat. You can see from the ground floor to the roof of the thing.”
The “already started building” line, offered by the President at the announcement, has drawn questions from people who have examined the site, which is a field. The field, for its part, has drawn no comments. It has, however, gotten several new flags, which a visitor told reporters “look very construction-y.”
"They've already started building."
Industry experts say the announcement is the culmination of a long American tradition of steel policy, which has alternated between protecting domestic steel, importing foreign steel, and announcing that a steel plant is going to be built in a state that was not previously in the conversation about steel. Iowa, analysts note, did not even exist as a steel state before this announcement, which is why the announcement of the steel plant in Iowa is described by trade groups as “transformative,” “historic,” and “we are monitoring this situation.”
Mesabi Metallics, the company behind the project, has been called a “foreign-owned steelmaker” in several news reports, a description the company disputes, noting that it is a U.S. corporation with a parent company in India, which is also a corporation, so the question of which country owns the steel plant has become a matter of which corporation you are willing to look at on which day of the week.
The White House says the plant will create thousands of jobs. The state of Iowa says the plant will create “a future.” A local farm bureau official said the field in question grows soybeans and that he had been told, “by people who are supposed to know,” that the soybeans were “flexible.”
At press time, the $15 billion plant had not yet broken ground, had not yet broken soil, and had not yet broken the existing lease on the field. The President was in Knoxville to watch college football. The crane in the distance, when asked by a reporter who drove past, had nothing to offer but the quiet dignity of cranes that have been parked on flat Iowa land for a great many years now.