Photo credit: Joseph Zadeh / Wikimedia Commons
Vice President J.D. Vance is in his Ohio hometown today to promote the Trump administration’s “America First” economic agenda. Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright will visit a factory that was tagged to be a hallmark of Biden-era industrial decarbonization efforts, which now, under the Trump administration, will double down on coal.
The Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant was awarded up to $500 million in 2024 as part of the Department of Energy’s Industrial Demonstrations Program. The funding for that project, obligated by the Inflation Reduction Act, survived the Trump administration’s sweeping cancellations of federal awards last year, even as other major awards within the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations were cancelled — and the office itself eventually shut down.
Last summer, however, Cleveland-Cliffs backed away from its green steel ambitions, telling investors at the time that it was negotiating with DOE to “explore changes to the scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities.”
Cleveland-Cliffs, a key supplier to the automotive industry, was originally awarded funding to replace one of seven blast furnaces at its Middletown Works mill with new, cleaner equipment. Traditional steelmaking uses coal-fired blast furnaces to convert iron ore into iron before the steel refining stage. DOE funding was slated to replace that coal-reliant step with equipment that uses natural gas, and eventually hydrogen, to make iron, and then electric furnaces to turn it into steel.
