Essar's Minnesota Mine Finally Produced Ore After 18 Years. Eleven Days Later, Trump Announced an $18 Billion Steel Plant to Go With It

In 2008, Essar Group broke ground on a taconite plant and iron ore mine near Nashwauk, Minnesota. Construction started in earnest by 2011, aiming for completion in 2013. It missed that deadline, and most of the ones that followed. By July 2016, Minnesota’s governor moved to terminate the project’s state mineral leases, and the Essar entity holding them filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Eighteen years and one bankruptcy later, the mine finally produced ore. Eleven days after that, Essar answered with a promise of a different order of magnitude: an $18 billion steel plant in Iowa, unveiled by President Trump at the White House.

Eighteen years of missed deadlines

The company that emerged from bankruptcy at the end of 2017, renamed Mesabi Metallics, inherited a project already nine years behind schedule and a fight with a much larger rival. Mesabi accused Cleveland-Cliffs, the iron ore giant that had picked up nearby mining rights, of leaning on contractors to abandon the site and using its market power to choke Mesabi’s financing. A federal bankruptcy judge later found enough evidence in that claim to let it go to trial.

Minnesota gave Mesabi one more chance in a 2020 lease amendment, with its own deadlines. The company missed those too. In 2023, the state revoked Mesabi’s remaining mineral leases and handed more than 2,600 acres of taconite rights to Cleveland-Cliffs instead. What kept the project alive was land Mesabi controlled outright: private leases at Nashwauk covering an estimated fifty years of ore reserves, separate from anything the state could take back.

Construction visibly resumed in 2024, on what was by then a sixteen-year-old promise. A Minnesota Reformer commentary on the restart carried a headline that captured the local mood after so many false starts, calling the $2 billion project “finally happening, for real this time.”

First ore, then a much bigger promise

This time, it held. On September 17, 2026, Mesabi set off a blast at the Nashwauk site that dislodged an estimated 1.3 million tons of ore, the first new taconite mine to open in the United States in roughly fifty years. The company has hired about 200 of a planned 350 full-time workers, and says its concentrators should be running by October, with pellet production to follow.

Eleven days after that blast, at a White House event, Trump said Mesabi Metallics would build what he called the “largest steel plant in American history,” a mill in Lee County in southeastern Iowa, fed by ore barged down the Mississippi River from the Minnesota mine.

Three numbers for one project

What the plant would actually cost depended on who in the room was asked. Trump and Mesabi Metallics put the figure at $18 billion. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave a different number, $17.5 billion, for the combined mine and plant. Indian press coverage published ahead of the event, drawing on company materials, had reported $15 billion. None of the three was reconciled publicly.

The plant is planned to produce up to 10 million tons of steel a year, with an initial run closer to 7.5 million tons, once it starts operating in 2030. Officials put the jobs count at roughly 1,750 permanent positions once running, with construction employing as many as 6,000 more over the build. Trump said the project would add $95 billion to the American economy over ten years, a figure he did not attribute to any study or agency.

An eighteen-year-old company’s new bet

Mesabi Metallics is chaired today by Rewant Ruia, from the family that controls Essar Group. “Thank you, US President Donald Trump, for bringing back the importance of building things in America,” he said at the announcement.

The company says its Nashwauk concentrators will be running by October, with pellet production close behind. The first ton of steel from the Iowa mill isn’t due until 2030.