Page 23 - Forbes - Asia (October 2019)

ENTREPRENEURS

Junkyard scrap
becomes giant
shimmering rolls
of steel.

Green Steel

After his partner dropped dead, globetrotting financier David Stickler found
himself at the helm of a steel mill startup in rural Arkansas. Now he runs the
best little high-tech, highly leveraged steelmaker in the U.S.

BY JONATHAN PONCIANO

nside cavernous blue hangars set on 445 hectares of what flat-rolled steel mill. One display uses an optical emission
was once soy fields abutting the Mississippi River, a suc- spectrometer to analyze the composition of the molten steel
cession of 270-tonne scrap-filled buckets—the remains in real time, determining the amount of alloys like copper
Iof old cars and refrigerators—await their turn at the fur- in the mix. A red display shows that the furnace—about 18
nace. Wailing sirens pierce the deafening rumble, and sparks
meters—is at 1,622 degrees Celsius.
TIM PANNELL FOR FORBES fly as blindingly yellow flames rise up from the glowing ladle. home of legendary blues guitarist Albert King and headquar-
Welcome to Osceola, Arkansas (pop. 6,764), onetime
Overlooking the action there’s a control room with a
ters to Big River Steel, the future of steel production on the
lone operator in front of a dozen LCD monitors displaying
planet. The mini mill, which is producing 4 million kilograms
graphics representing data from thousands of sensors on
nearly every piece of equipment in the 163,509 square meter
of hot-rolled steel each day or about 1.5 billion per year,

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