The day before we arrived in March, the Welsh Government announced the creation of a Freeport encompassing Port Talbot and Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. It was widely seen as a breakthrough for what has become one of the more deprived parts of the country.
The UK, with all its cars and buildings, generates comfortably enough scrap steel to provide all the steel it currently uses. The region will leverage its natural geography and its long expertise in engineering and manufacturing to become an industrial powerhouse again.Replacing the blast furnaces here with electric arc furnaces could cost up to £3bn, especially if Tata uses the opportunity to replace some of the aged steel production facilities here too.
"We want to have fairness, a fair deal for our communities, for our people, and for the UK to be competitive in future." Second, pretty much every other government is helping subsidise green steel plans like these. All the steelmakers want, they say, is a level playing field. And if Tata modernises other bits of its operations further job losses are likely. Indeed, Sky News understands that internal estimates imply the number of workers at Port Talbot could be reduced from 4,000 to as few as 1,000 workers.
None of Britain's big steelworks is considering a DRI plant, but a prototype operation in Sweden is already pushing ahead with one.Since Theresa May legislated to get to net zero by 2050 we have had a succession of different Conservative administrations, each with a starkly different flavour of industrial strategy, culminating with a prime minister who seems far less interested in manufacturing than finance and aAnd the deeper you dig into government policy, the more flummoxing it is.
The vast bulk of materials going into those turbines is steel of various sorts, primarily the steel in the enormous towers that jut out from the waves. How the wind turbine market has functioned up until now is that the vast majority of steel in our turbines has been made in Asia and then shipped across the world.
But just as much thought needs to go into the other processes elsewhere in steelworks. Are we pressing that steel into the right kinds of products?
EdConwaySky Brilliant piece EdConwaySky 👏🏽👏🏽 Wish such journalism was more common these days.
EdConwaySky To put this in context there were 6 electric arc furnaces on the other side of Rotherham doing the same thing 60 years ago. All running on scrap steel but if you don’t have an industrial strategy and an energy strategy ……
EdConwaySky I spent my work experience in my local steelworks in north wales back in 1986. Saw the procedure at the furnace. Who knew that 5 years later the steelworks would shut down when UES bought if off GKN to do just that, close it down. No government bail out back then either.
EdConwaySky A great article. But most of the world went mini mill in the 1980’s. At that time it was 100% against government policy to invest in the future of state owned enterprises A fallacy we are still paying for now
EdConwaySky Is this the Sanjay Gupta thingy? Beware.
EdConwaySky Have you never been to school, Ed…That’s where little kids learn how steel is produced…The quality of journalism 2023…
I did a research at oxford & presented to British steel directors around 1980. Climate & CO2 is not an issue. The key to success is huge investment, energy efficient furnaces & a energy supply that is competitive without other competitive governments subsidies in their production
Should never have not been public. Sold off, wrongly.