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U.S. Steel operates three facilities in the U.S. that still rely on coal. Two are in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley near Pittsburgh and one is in Gary, Indiana.

The company was once an industrial powerhouse, but has faced challenges for several decades due to competition from cheaper steel produced in other parts of the world. The proposed sale to Nippon Steel is pitched as a solution to the company’s financial woes, but union opposition has framed it as a means to generate exponential profits for executives at the expense of workers.

All three U.S. Steel plants still reliant on coal are regularly fined for violating clean air regulations. The Clairton Coke Works, about 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, is the largest coke-making plant in the country —a process that involves cooking coal at extremely high temperatures to create a key steelmaking ingredient known as “coke.” Coke made at the Clairton Coke Works supplies both the other western Pennsylvania steel plant and the Indiana plant.

Coke oven emissions are associated with a long list of negative health effects. Residents near the Clairton Coke Works, many of whom are low-income people of color, have higher rates of asthma, higher cancer risk and higher risk of developing more severe cases of respiratory and lung disease.

Residents impacted by the plant’s ongoing pollution problems in Pennsylvania are also worried about what the sale might mean for existing legal agreements over pollution violations.

For example, in March a judge finalized a settlement that requires U.S. Steel to spend nearly $20 million upgrading its western Pennsylvania facilities and put an additional $5 million into health and clean air programs in local communities. It’s the largest Clean Air Act citizen suit payout in Pennsylvania history and the third-largest in U.S. history, according to environmental advocates.

“It s completely unacceptable and untenable for a community to be subjected to thousands of violations of the Clean Air Act for decades.” - Matt Mehalik, Breathe Project

The settlement was the result of a lawsuit filed by the Allegheny County Health Department, which oversees local air quality, and environmental advocacy groups PennEnvironment and the Clean Air Council, in response to a fire that knocked out pollution controls at the company’s Clairton plant in 2018. The incident resulted in weeks of substantial Clean Air Act violations and well-documented health effects.

The agreement also requires U.S. Steel to invest in measures to prevent similar pollution events, creates financial penalties for pollution control equipment outages for the next five years and requires the company to shut down one of its oldest, dirtiest coke ovens.

“This is not just about a financial penalty to U.S. Steel,” Matt Donohue, a staff attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, who argued the case, told EHN. “During discovery it became apparent that if nothing was done there would be more outages, more pollution events and more harm to the communities surrounding the plant. Preventing that from happening was the most important thing to us.”

In an email, U.S. Steel spokesperson Andrew Fulton said, “U. S. Steel employs more than 3,000 hardworking men and women throughout its [southwestern Pennsylvania] facilities … their work has yielded exceptional, measurable results including an environmental and permit regulation compliance rate exceeding 99%.”

U.S. Steel has reached similar settlements over other pollution incidents. According to Donohue and a spokesperson for U.S. Steel, these agreements will remain in place and remain legally binding regardless of who owns the company.

“That’s true for all agreements like this, but because we knew the sale was possible, we also went through our agreement with a fine-toothed comb to make sure that whoever owns this company has to comply with all of the terms of the agreement on the same timeline,” Donohue said.