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Wright Announces Steel Investments at Cleveland-Cliffs' Butler Works in Pennsylvania, Oct. 6, 2026

October 6, 2026 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:37:00

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced investments in American steel making at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Butler Works in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the October 6, 2026 event. The plant is the last in the country producing electrical steel — the cores and laminations that go into transformers — a point Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman and CEO Lourenco Goncalves made at length: transformers, he argued, must be produced in the United States, and they can only be produced if Butler Works operates.

Speakers at the event put the package at a $200 million investment in specialized steel production, supported by a $75 million Department of Energy grant, bringing new furnaces to Cleveland-Cliffs that will increase the plant’s production by nearly 25 percent, as stated at the event. Goncalves credited President Trump’s Section 232 tariffs with making the investment possible: events like this one, he said, “simply would not be possible without President Trump’s use of section 232 authority.”

Why it matters

Butler Works is where Wright’s energy agenda meets the grid it is trying to expand: every transmission upgrade the department funds elsewhere runs on transformers, and the steel inside them is made, in the United States, only here — the administration’s stated reason for putting federal money and tariff protection behind the plant at once.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the $200 million Butler Works investment and $75 million Energy Department grant as announced October 6, 2026, with a production increase of nearly 25 percent stated at the event. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Announces Investments in American Steel Making in Pennsylvania” (official upload, embedded above; remarks as delivered at the event).