A costly plan will keep a steel plant in JD Vance’s hometown running. Locals are aghast: ‘It’s horrible’ | US news

It was only a few months after moving from Louisville to Middletown, Ohio, four years ago that Vivian Adams’ six-year-old daughter’s asthma problem worsened.

“My daughter was born prematurely, so she already had lung problems,” she says.[but] it got worse. She remains sick, coughing and can no longer breathe. She had to take medication every day for her asthma, plus she had a rescue inhaler.

All the while, pollution from the Cleveland-Cliffs coal-fired steel plant, located several hundred yards behind his house, was omnipresent.

This is the same factory where James Vance, the grandfather of US Vice President JD Vance, worked for years. Vance, born and raised in Middletown, has repeatedly called clean energy projects a “scam.” As an Ohio senator, his election campaigns were partly funded by fossil fuel companies.

But for Adams, given her family’s proximity to the steel mill, anything is better than what she has to face as soon as she gets out.

Adams says, “We sit in our chairs and there’s a bunch of black stuff on them, on our vehicle, it’s soot. It’s on their toys, so you can’t leave them out.”

Recent events mean none of this is likely to change for her or the hundreds of other Middletown residents who live in the shadow of the big coke-burning steel mill.

New permitting documents posted on the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency website show that Cleveland-Cliffs plans to reline the blast furnace at its Middletown facility — a several hundred million dollar move that would pave the way for burning fossil fuels at the facility for at least another 15 to 18 years.

Local residents are dismayed.

“It’s horrible,” Adams said. “Some days the smell is absolutely horrible.”

Last summer, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves used Donald Trump verbiage to tell investors he was considering a “nice coal, nice coke” upgrade to the plant. Blast Furnace No. 3, first installed in the 1950s, uses hundreds of thousands of tons of coke each year to produce about 3 million tons of crude steel per year.

The move follows the Trump-Vance administration’s termination of a $500 million subsidy for the facility to replace coke-burning infrastructure with a hydrogen-fueled furnace that, by some accounts, would have allowed the Middletown plant to become the lowest greenhouse gas-emitting steel plant in the world.

Instead, residents could find themselves stuck in additional decades of dirty, chemical-polluted environmental hazards. Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to clean up the steel industry, Goncalves told Politico last year, “I believe what Trump is trying to do is for the good of the country.” »

Emails sent to Cleveland-Cliffs asking whether Department of Energy money previously earmarked for the proposed hydrogen-powered infrastructure should be reallocated to pay for the cost of relining were not responded to. Emails sent to the Department of Energy in Washington DC asking similar questions were not answered.

“Cleveland-Cliffs already generates a large amount of hazardous waste and is responsible for determining whether the waste from this work is hazardous or not and managing it accordingly,” says Anthony Chenault of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Chenault was unable to estimate the volume of waste that relining the blast furnace would generate, how the waste would be classified or precisely where it would be disposed of.

“Disposal options are selected by the facility, consistent with state and federal requirements,” says Chenault.

A 2024 report from Industrious Labs, a nonprofit that advocates for the decarbonization of heavy industries in the United States, found that Middletown Works ranks among the top 10 emitters of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and other pollutants among more than 650 emitters in Ohio.

“Based on the estimated health impact of the Middletown steel mill and its coke supplier, SunCoke Energy, and assuming that pollution and population levels remain constant, we estimate that over the 18 years following the relining of the Middletown plants, 810 to 1,476 premature deaths, 132,300 lost school days,” and a host of other health problems, says Ariana Criste from Industrious Labs.

The site is the 11th largest emitter of carbon monoxide in the country, according to data from the EPA’s National Emissions Inventory database collected in 2020.

Next to Middletown Works is the SunCoke Energy facility, which has the capacity to burn up to 550,000 tons of coal per year to create coke, contributing to high levels of pollution in the area.

“Together, these two facilities account for more than half of Ohio’s total health impacts from steel and coke plant pollution, contributing to an estimated $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion in health costs per year in the state,” Criste says.

Despite Trump’s tariff regime helping U.S. steelmakers, the industry grew just 3% last year, according to figures released last month.

Last year, Cleveland-Cliffs closed an iron ore mine and a taconite mine in Minnesota, resulting in the loss of 600 jobs, and in January the company announced more layoffs. In February, the company reported a $600 million loss in consolidated revenue for 2025. Goncalves blamed the decline, among other reasons, on auto production issues and “adverse new dynamics” in the Canadian market.

Steel imports fell 12.6% last year, largely due to tariffs.

Analysts say few, other than steel barons such as Goncalves, see the benefits of the tariff regime. Sectors such as automobiles have seen massive layoffs due to falling consumer demand driven by rising steel costs.

Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest producer of flat-rolled steel in North America, employs about 25,000 people in Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ontario, and now, with the blessing of the Trump administration, many people in adjacent communities will face many more years of air pollution.

Last month, the company announced that its Burns Harbor Works, Indiana, plant would also reline its blast furnace next year. The plant is located adjacent to Indiana’s only national park and on the south shore of Lake Michigan, near several cities. The American Lung Association rates Porter County, home to Burns Harbor Works, with an “F” grade for days with high ozone and 24-hour particle pollution.

For Vivian Adams and her children, ages nine, six and four, in Middletown, the news of the blast furnace relining comes as a big disappointment because she hopes to buy the house she currently rents.

“It’s everything we needed or wanted,” she says from outside her home, where, on a recent Friday evening, she waits for her children to get off their school bus.

The company sends crews to residents’ properties to pressure clean soot and chemical dust from their homes. On one occasion, Adams said, workers broke down a door: “They’re doing the worst work in the world.” »

She said if she could talk to Vance, who grew up four miles away, she would ask him to pursue the cleaner, hydrogen-powered system proposed by the previous administration.

She said: “If it’s on cars, imagine what’s happening in our lungs? »