MASON COUNTY, WV (WOWK) – The largest steel company in North America, Nucor Steel, held its groundbreaking ceremony in Mason County on Friday, and construction should begin right away.
Construction for the new Nucor facility is supposed to take two to three years. Once it’s completed, hundreds of jobs will be brought to Mason County.
Nucor is being celebrated because of the overwhelming excitement locals and Nucor officials feel about Nucor finding a new home in West Virginia.
“This is as big as anything that’s happened in West Virginia. Not only the size and the magnitude of what you see at this building sight, but the jobs that’s coming and the type of industry that this is,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said.
Sen. Manchin continued, “This is not something we have to worry about ‘Oh, is it gonna stay or make it or not?’ This is steel. This will be the cleanest and the greenest steel in the world that’s being made right in West Virginia, and the demand is going to be unbelievable. The duration of this plant, we’re talking about decades and decades and decades.”
One of the biggest reasons Nucor moved to West Virginia was because of the people.
“It’s a fantastic community. They have been so good for us coming in and welcoming us with open arms. It’s just been fantastic,” Kurt Huelsman said. Huelsman is the Construction Project Manager for Nucor West Virginia
“All the time I’ve been here, I’ve never met kinder, more resilient people than those that I’ve met here in Mason County. A lot of their history has been built here on the river, and it’s revitalizing the community, and the river is obviously a critical part of what Nucor is going to do here,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said.
The project is a $3.1 billion investment, and part of Nucor’s mission is producing steel through what they call an environmentally friendly process.
“Eighty percent of all the materials we consume is scrap, and we’ll take old cars and turn them into new cars through the steel maker process,” Vice President and General Manager for Nucor Steel West Virginia John Farris said.
Huelsman echoed the same message of the importance of making environmentally conscious decisions while producing steel in this new facility.
“When you see a Nucor steel sheet mill, it doesn’t look like a steel mill. You don’t see any pollutants in the air or anything like that. It’s just a clean, good-looking mill, and it will be a tremendous asset for the community,” Huelsman said.
For those just like construction project manager Kurt Huelsman, the anticipation of the project completion is high.
“The best part is going from the field to having the equipment operating. It’s exhilarating when we start to melt shop and we start melting our steel for the first time and start rolling it into coils and seeing the coils ship out the door to our customers. It’s tremendous.”
The next steps are building the facility and getting ready for Nucor job positions to eventually be filled.
“I don’t know if people are really prepared for the surge that’s going to happen as far as the manufacturing and the jobs that are going to come with it, the housing that’s going to be needed, the workforce that’s going to be needed,” Sen. Manchin said.
To add more excitement to this day, a Guinness World Record was broken during the ceremony when 545 people participated in this breaking ground ceremony. Each person grabbed a shovel and made history in Mason County.