The Marietta Industrial Complex, which sprawled along an Ohio State Route 7 just south of Marietta, Ohio, employed 12,000 people in its heyday, half of whom were involved with the manufacture of alloys. As time progressed and focus on product shifted, Union Carbide sold the businesses in the complex, including the Alloys Division, which was purchased, along with the power plant, in 1981 by Norwegian alloys manufacturer Elkem Metals. In 1989, Elkem sold 70% of the Power Station, with the remaining interest sold in 1999 when Eramet Group purchased the alloys facility.
Time and progress continued marching forward, leading to Eramet's closure of the plant's Electrolytic Manganese facility in 2001 and indefinite idling of the Electrolytic Chromium operations in 2009. The decisions, while not easy to make, were driven mainly by market demand for the specialized products manufactured in the two facilities, located on the north side of the plant. Divesting of these two processes also allowed Eramet Marietta to focus on capital improvements to its manganese alloys manufacturing operations - enabling the company to invest in an improvement project to rebuild the largest of the plant's three furnaces in 2008 and a similar project on the second largest furnace in the spring of 2010.
