They held the groundbreaking on 4 September. The air permit still has not been issued, and company representatives confirmed that construction cannot come out of the ground until it is.
Site preparation has started in Donaldsonville, Ascension Parish. Everything above grade waits on a piece of paper.
The plant
HYUNDAI-POSCO Louisiana Steel LLC is a $5.8 billion electric arc furnace mill sized for 2.7 million tons a year of hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated sheet, split roughly 1.8 million tons of automotive sheet and 900,000 tons of general product. Hyundai Motor Group holds 80 percent through Hyundai Steel at 50, Hyundai Motor at 15 and Kia at 15; POSCO holds the remaining 20 and will invest a further $582 million into Hyundai Steel through a wholly owned subsidiary by the end of 2027.
Construction is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, with commercial production targeted for early 2029. HPLS chief executive Hyung Jin Kim put direct employment at 1,300 at an average salary of about $95,000, with roughly 5,400 jobs claimed including indirect.
What is verified and what is marketing
The tonnage, the job counts, the $95,000 average salary and the description of the plant as the world’s first fully integrated EAF mill specialized in automotive sheet are all company claims. The salary figure is a statement made at a ribbon-cutting, not a payroll filing. The low-carbon positioning is relative to blast-furnace steelmaking and is not backed by any published third-party environmental product declaration.
Rural Roots Louisiana and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade have raised environmental impact, the scale of public subsidy and whether community-benefit commitments are enforceable. Those are advocacy positions and should be read as claims rather than findings, in the same way the company’s are. The company reports more than $31,000 in local donations to date, including $10,000 to the food bank.
Why the sequence matters more than the tonnage
Announcing a groundbreaking ahead of the regulatory critical path is common and it is usually harmless. It becomes expensive when the permit is the long pole and the schedule was published against the ceremony. Q4 2026 for construction start and early 2029 for production leaves very little float if the air permit runs long, and air permitting for a new EAF melt shop in Louisiana is not a formality.
For the domestic supply picture, 2.7 million tons of new EAF sheet capacity is the substantive number. It also arrives as the raw material side reorganizes: the Simandou project in Guinea is ramping toward 120 million tonnes a year of high-grade iron ore aimed largely at blast-furnace and DRI feed, while U.S. capacity additions keep going to scrap-fed electric arc. Those two trends are not pointed in the same direction, and the mills being built now will spend the 2030s finding out which one mattered.