Solar-Powered Hybar Steel Begins Rebar Production, Plans Second Mill

This story originally appeared in Arkansas Business. Read it here.

When CEO Dave Stickler and his partners founded Hybar Steel in August 2023, they promised a 22-month countdown to three ambitious goals:

To build Hybar into a state-of-the-art rebar plant, to run it mostly with solar and battery-saved power, and to put a working port on the Mississippi River near the plant site in Osceola.

Arkansas Business sat down with Stickler remotely this month, just a week after Hybar announced making its first rebar, to discover how he met the challenge.

In a rapid-fire 40-minute interview, the “Steve Jobs of American Steel” described progress on the Hybar project, its forerunners and its future. Stickler mused about tariffs, free trade and a deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel.

“Hybar had $1 billion in financing and three employees other than myself and our CFO, Ari Levy, when it was formed on Aug. 1, 2023,” Stickler said. “This was day one. We immediately bought 1,300 acres of northeast Arkansas farmland and told the world we were going to do three things: The first was to build what we believe will be the world’s most environmentally sustainable steel production facility.”

Stickler built Hybar with much the same team that built Big River Steel down the street, starting construction in 2014.

“We have the same group of investors, same bank, many of the same employees, the same railroad, and the same power company, Entergy.”

Stickler also had an old ally in Lexicon Inc. of Little Rock, a key partner in building Big River Steel.

“Being able to build three projects in 22 months using our $1 billion, which included our contingency, is a testament to the great team assembled at Hybar, and the partnership Hybar formed with Lexicon, the construction manager for all three projects,” Levy said.

The Hybar mill shares Big River’s top goal, leading the industry in sustainability.

Solar Vision

But the Hybar plant’s second goal was unique, to power its scrap-metal recycling process with the largest behind-the-meter solar field in the United States. Its 186,000 solar panels cover about 400 acres, and the power feeds directly into the plant, Stickler said.

“Behind the meter means that I don’t have to feed my solar power onto the grid to get it into my plant operation,” He said. “I can show my customers the sunshine, my own solar panels and my transmission line.” Other plants build solar fields, but feed their power onto the grid for credit from the utility. That means the electricity actually powering the mill is coming from a mix of sources — coal-fired power plants, nuclear generators, natural gas-powered plants, etc.

“There’s no way you’ll be able to say with certainty that the renewable power that’s being produced by the solar panels is actually getting to your operation,” Stickler said. “That’s why it was critical to be behind the meter.”

The solar facility is a 105-megawatt direct current installation augmented with a 160-megawatt battery storage system. It will store excess sun power for use at night and on cloudy days. Depcom Power Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona, designed and built the solar and battery storage facility.

The sustainability factor proved crucial to the plant’s financing.

Koch Minerals & Trading of Wichita, Kansas, invested in both Big River and Hybar, along with Stickler’s own investment firm, Global Principal Partners of Miami. “Anytime I put a project together, we at Global Principal Partners like to put in 20% to 30% of the equity ownership,” Stickler said.

Another main backer, TGP Capital, invested from its TPG Rise Climate fund.

“That is the fund that TPG, one of the top 10 largest private equity firms in the world, uses to invest in projects that they think have an opportunity to be industry-leading in terms of sustainability,” Stickler said. Hybar fits that category in the steel industry, TPG determined.

The plant is using power from Entergy for now, but expects to start producing 100% renewably made rebar next month. Hybar has a special rate with Entergy, and will buy supplemental power from the utility. Primetals Technologies USA LLC of Alpharetta, Georgia, installed most onsite electrical infrastructure, including the substation and power distribution network, Hybar officials said.

“We told the world we were also going to build our own Mississippi River port dock, and we’ve done that as well,” Stickler said, noting that it has been operating since January.

The port will be a key departure point when Hybar ramps up to producing 700,000 tons per year of rebar with just 154 employees. That capacity will rank the plant atop the world’s most efficient, Stickler said. The rebar will be sold in several sizes, from those used in sidewalks, highways and bridges to huge gauges used in undersea projects.

As Stickler spoke, Hybar was commissioning a 105-ton electric arc furnace and continuous caster. It was also completing its rolling mill and solar and battery storage facility. “SMS group GmbH provided Hybar’s electric arc furnace, continuous caster, rolling mill and water treatment plant,” the company said in a June 2 news release.

The rebar, on spools as massive as 8 tons, will travel from the port up and down the Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio and Arkansas rivers. It will also ship by rail on the BNSF Railway Co. and others, and go via truck up and down Interstate 55.

Soup and Pizza

Stickler explained how the arc furnace and continuous caster will work.

“We will have the largest electric arc furnace to produce rebar in operation in the United States. It’s a 104-megawatt furnace with a 40-ton hot heel. It’s highly efficient and has very, very limited carbon emissions” when run to Hybar’s standards, Stickler said.

“Imagine it’s a big pot of soup, and the pot’s about 40% full of broth, and you start putting in some celery, some chicken. All of those ingredients are scrap metal, old cars, shredded old refrigerators or air conditioners, anything made of steel that’s discarded.”

Once Hybar melts the scrap metal, the molten steel comes out vertically from the bottom of the furnace. “Our rolling mill, however, is horizontal,” Stickler said. “I’ve got to get it to turn 90 degrees so I can roll it in.”

The caster sprays water on the outside of the molten steel, forming a crust that Stickler likened to a pizza’s. “The pizza crust can be crusty on the outside but still doughy on the inside. So we have to put the right amount of water on it. Too much, and it will solidify and not make the 90-degree turn. Too little, and the crust won’t be thick enough and the molten equivalent of the dough in the middle of the pizza crust will break through. You’ll have a big mess on your hands, because all this molten metal will be on the floor.”

Efficiency Factors

At 700,000 tons of rebar a year, Hybar will produce about 6% of all the rebar consumed nationwide currently. “If I use current pricing of about $780 a ton, it’s in excess of a half a billion a year in revenue,” Stickler said. “It will be one of the largest rebar mills in the United States from a capacity perspective.”

And only 154 employees will be producing those 700,000 tons each year, Stickler emphasized. “That’s 4,545 tons of rebar per year per worker,” Stickler said. “I have competitors that struggle to get 2,000 tons per year per worker, and the reason we can do it with so few workers is that the mill is highly automated, and Hybar doesn’t have tiered layers of management. There’s no bureaucracy in our company.”

Other steelmakers might have eight or nine different layers of management, he said. “For us the equivalent would be two or three.”

At Big River, Stickler’s team ultimately made 5,000 tons of steel per year per worker. “Some of our competitors struggled to get 900 tons per year per worker,” Stickler said. The big difference is that Stickler had brand new mills. “The automation is amazing. Remember, in the United States, rebar mills are still operating that were built 80 or 100 years ago.”

Stickler said Arkansas is a great place to do business, and a terrific hotbed for the steel industry.

“We started up Hybar here in 22 months; we started up Big River in 27 months,” he said. “We have a highly skilled workforce that trains very well. We had many of the same project participants in both, including technology provider SMS out of Germany, and the same lead bank, KfW, and many of the same construction contractors.”

Those included Lexicon, the Systems Group of El Dorado and Stracener Brothers Construction of Blytheville.

Stickler already has a Hybar 2 plant on the drawing board, he said.

“We’re absolutely considering that,” he said. “We have received technical proposals from two different groups, and we have the mill design layout. When we built Hybar 1, our plan was to allow optionality for Hybar 2, much the same way we did Big River 1, allowing design features that would give us the option of building a second mill relatively easily.”

If plans proceed, a groundbreaking could come as early as late this year or the first quarter of 2026, Stickler said. “The investment would be in the $800 million range.”