Wieland East Alton Hot Rolling Mill Modernization, Illinois

Wieland’s East Alton modernization puts a new hot rolling mill inside a copper plant that has been running since 1916, and the old mill has to keep producing until the new one is ready. Structural steel for the building topped out in January 2026. The $500 million project is due to finish in mid-2028.

Project Scope

The plant is in East Alton, Illinois, just outside St. Louis. It spent most of its life as Olin Brass, made ammunition in wartime, and once employed as many as 1,800 people, according to the Labor Tribune. Germany’s Wieland bought it in 2021.

The centerpiece, which the company calls EA2030, is a new building that will house a hot mill line, a milling line, a cold rolling mill and high-bay storage with automated material handling and overhead cranes. It replaces the site’s original hot rolling facility, roughly a century old. ENR’s March 2025 report adds deep foundations for new casting equipment, a furnace, a re-cooling system and distribution switchgear, all under metal siding and roofing on heavy structural steel.

Graycor Construction leads the design-build team with Helmkamp Construction. Vestal Corp. is handling civil, structural, architectural and building MEP design. Salas O’Brien has the process engineering. Graycor credited Merrill Steel and union ironworkers for the steel milestone.

Work started in June 2024. Design and equipment fabrication are running in parallel to compress the schedule, ENR reported, and the next phase is process equipment. Graycor says the team had logged more than 125,000 hours without a lost-time injury at topping out.

Why It Matters

The hard part isn’t the steel. It’s the address. ENR describes construction next to live plant operations on a very tight site. Wieland is keeping its existing lines at full capacity while crews dig deep foundations next to them. Brownfield heavy-industrial work rarely gets the attention a greenfield battery plant does. It’s usually harder.

The money is partly public. Illinois put together a package worth about $231 million, including roughly $172 million in tax benefits over 30 years under its Reimagining Energy and Vehicles program and capital funding for a new electrical substation. In return, the deal is expected to retain 800 jobs in the state. That’s retention, not growth. The Labor Tribune noted 100 layoffs at the plant the October before the announcement.

Wieland is selling the project on demand for copper and copper alloy strip in electric vehicles, charging equipment and renewable energy. The East Alton layout is modeled on the company’s plant in Vöhringen, Germany.

EV forecasts have been revised more than once since this deal was signed in early 2024. That matters less here than it would at a battery plant. Copper strip goes into a lot of things, and whatever the mix turns out to be, East Alton gets a rolling mill built this century. The last one ran for about a hundred years.

Project Team & Details