Green Steel

After his partner dropped dead in his hotel room, globe-trotting 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 nation.

- Jonathan Ponciano

Inside cavernous blue hangars set on 1,100 acres of what was once soy fields abutting the Mississippi River, a succession of 300-tonne scrap-filled buckets—the remains of old cars and refrigerators—await their turn at the furnace. Wailing sirens pierce the deafening rumble, and sparks fly as blindingly yellow flames rise up from the glowing ladle.

Overlooking the action there’s a control room with a lone operator in front of a dozen LCD monitors displaying graphics representing data from thousands of sensors on nearly every piece of equipment in the 1.76-million-sq-ft flat-rolled steel mill. One display uses an optical emission spectrometer to analyse the composition of the molten steel in real time, determining the amount of alloys like copper in the mix. A red display shows that the furnace—no more than 60 feet away— is at 2,951 degrees Fahrenheit.

Welcome to Osceola, Arkansas (population 6,764), onetime home of legendary blues guitarist Albert King and headquarters to Big River Steel, the future of steel production on the planet. The mini mill, which is producing 4,500 tonnes of hotrolled steel each day or about 1.65 million per year, began operating only 31 months ago thanks to almost $1 billion in high-yield-debt financing, a slug of equity from Koch Industries, Arkansas’s teachers’ pension fund, private equity firm TPG Capital and the sheer operating zeal of a little-known investment banker named David Stickler.

“We view ourselves as a technology company that just happens to make steel,” says Stickler.