About 60% of steel for Bills new stadium to come from New York

That steelmaking capability is gone now, so none of the roughly 25,000 tons of steel going into the Bills’ $1.7 billion stadium will come from the Buffalo Niagara region.

But much of it still will come from New York.

State officials said Friday they anticipate 60% of all the structural steel that will be used in one of Western New York’s largest ever construction projects will be produced in the state. Almost all of it will be manufactured in the United States.

“We wanted to see domestic steel and we’re obviously looking for as much of the materials and labor to be as local as possible,” said Steven Ranalli, president at Erie County Stadium Corp.

“It’s a big job so it attracts a lot of national firms to come in but they’re all bringing in local subcontractors and minority- and women-owned businesses and service-disabled businesses to support along the way,” he said.

The state is working with Cives Steel Co., a national firm headquartered in St. Lawrence, north of the Adirondacks, as the prime contractor for the steel work. The company will use three fabrication shops throughout New York to deliver the steel for the project.

Steel from New York will also be manufactured at JPW Structural Contracting in Syracuse and A&T Ironworks in New Rochelle.

Steel production in New York isn’t what it used to be. These days, the state’s steel production is under 1 million tons annually, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.

That pales in comparison to the nation’s leader in steel production, Indiana, which made over 21 million tons of steel in 2022, and even the second highest steel producer, Ohio, with more than 10 million tons of steel made that year.

The U.S. no longer dominates global steel production. Of the nearly 2…