Steel is the basic resource. It is everywhere in our daily lives, even when we don’t think about it. It’s in the roads we drive on, the bridges we cross, the buildings we live and work in. It forms the machines that grow our food, the vehicles that move us, and the defense systems that protect us. From submarines to skyscrapers, pipelines to power lines, steel is the backbone of modern civilization.
There are more than a hundred types of steel. Each has its own recipe, its own performance and purpose. But they all have one thing in common: they start with pig iron.
What is pig iron and why it matters
In simple terms, pig iron is the purest iron feedstock used in steelmaking. It is produced by removing oxygen and impurities from iron ore, so steelmakers can start with a clean, predictable base.
The odd name comes from old industry slang, not from anything to do with pigs. In practice, when steelmakers talk about pig iron, they mean a form of iron that is as close as you can reasonably get to “pure” iron in an industrial setting. That purity is what makes it so valuable.
Today, about 75 percent of U.S. steel is made in electric arc furnaces. Many of these furnaces run on a blend of scrap and pig iron. Scrap provides the volume, but pig iron provides the chemistry. Without that share of high-quality pig iron, you simply cannot produce the advanced steels needed for sectors like automotive, defense, infrastructure and energy.
The missing link: 100 percent imported
For something so fundamental, the United States has a surprising weakness: the lack of domestic production of merchant pig iron.
U.S. supply of merchant pig iron comes entirely from imports. In a typical year, the United States brings in about six million tons. Before the Russia–Ukraine conflict, roughly sixty percent of that total, close to four million tons, came from those two countries. When that supply was disrupted, it made clear how dependent key U.S. sectors are on foreign pig iron and steel.
If we lose access to imported pig iron, we do not just have a pricing problem. We have a structural problem for our steelmakers and for every sector that depends on them. America imports between 40 and 50 million tons of iron and steel every year, yet Minnesota alone has enough iron ore to supply the country for hundreds of years.
That gap is what made me look more closely at the iron that has been sitting in my home state of Minnesota for generations.
A legacy beneath our feet in Minnesota
I was born and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the heart of the Iron Range. I spent thirty years in civil construction, often working near the massive iron ore stockpiles that define the region, some of them 300 feet high and twenty acres in size.
About twenty years ago, I started asking what was really in those piles. I learned that some of them contain 30, 40, even 50 percent iron, which is higher than what many mining companies are taking out of the ground today.
Most people assume those piles are waste. They are not. They were put there on purpose. During the early 1900s, through World War I and World War II, Minnesota supplied a huge share of the iron that went into American steel. In the Second World War alone, Northern Minnesota produced the majority of the iron ore used in the war effort. The highest-grade ore was processed first to meet urgent demand for tanks, ships, planes and weapons.The remaining material was not thrown away. It was stored on the surface and organized by grade and impurity content, with the clear expectation that it would be utilized in the future.
Today those stockpiles hold more than a billion tons of iron ore above ground. Minnesota accounts for only about 1.5 percent of global iron ore reserves, yet that is enough iron to supply the United States for generations.
These resources were preserved for the future and that future is now.
A market transformed: why the timing changed
In 2017, U.S. tariff amendments on steel and aluminum shifted the economics of domestic production. That moment, and the discussions that followed, prompted me to look more closely at what was possible with the legacy resources in Minnesota. By 2020, it was clear that there was both a need and an opportunity, and I founded North American Iron.
Since 2018, following the tariff changes, the U.S. steel industry has invested more than 20 billion dollars in new mills and upgrades; this is a strong outcome for the country, adding about 25 million tons of domestic capacity. Yet about 20 percent of that capacity depends on virgin iron, which means the market now needs roughly five million additional tons of iron each year. Merchant pig iron is the elite feedstock for this additional steel production
At the same time, the United States lost nearly four million tons of pig iron supply from Russia and Ukraine. So the market faces a simple math problem. We have a growing domestic steel industry that needs more pig iron. We have fewer imports available to meet that need. And we still import 100 percent of our merchant pig iron.
North American Iron is where the solution begins. Minnesota holds a billion tons of proven, surface-accessible material that earlier generations preserved for this moment. The resource is here. The demand is here. My goal is to connect them and restore a reliable, domestic supply of pig iron for American steelmakers.
Building a domestic solution on a proven foundation
Thus North American Iron’s mission is straightforward. We want to use America’s own resources to supply a critical material that the U.S. currently imports entirely. Our goal is to restore U.S. control of the iron feedstock that makes modern steel, which fuels our everyday lives.
We will do this by linking a preserved resource to a proven process. Through our sister company, Calumet Reclamation Company, we will reclaim and process Minnesota’s legacy iron ore stockpiles that were intentionally set aside for future recovery. The reclaimed material will move by existing rail from Minnesota to North Dakota. There, North American Iron will manufacture high-purity, low-emission pig iron for U.S. steelmakers.
NAI will pave a practical path for America to make its own iron by using proven equipment and methods. We will use Tenova HYL, a mature, proven technology that has been used in many plants around the world. It uses hydrogen as the main reductant to strip oxygen from iron ore, producing a clean, high-quality iron product that is well suited for electric arc furnace steelmaking. For North American Iron, that means we can manufacture pig iron in a way that is both efficient and low emission. Our process is expected to generate up to 96 percent fewer carbon emissions than imported pig iron.
Permitting for the project began in 2024 and is targeted for completion in 2026. The construction will follow for roughly three years, with production planned in 2029. At full scale, NAI’s facility will produce two million tons of pig iron per year.
