UK’s largest steelworks given £500M to decarbonise

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2023/09/uk-s-largest-steelworks-given-500m-to-decarbonise-but-3000-jobs-could-be-lost/

by adrian_mrd • 3 years ago

26 48 3 years ago

eandt.theiet.org

Retr0id• 3 years ago

It is not a just transition if thousands of jobs are sacrificed in the name of short-term environmental gains.

I'm never happy to see people lose their jobs, but "short-term environmental gains" strikes me as a ridiculous way of framing a significant reduction of carbon emissions.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

They're taking all that government money but still making huge job cuts. So presumably production is going down?

Therefore more steel will be imported, shipped across the world using fossil fuels.

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

Shipping uses basically no energy. The ocean is, functionally, dead level. When the cargo gets to its destination it has gained no potential energy. This is why ocean freight is by far the least carbon-intensive way of moving material. You should not be concerned about whether anything was shipped from overseas, in the global scheme of energy inefficiency.

Dennip• 3 years ago

This money is mostly going towards converting coal furnaces to electric furnaces, to meet the govts emissions targets, with Tata also investing money (the conversion costs more than 500m). But this steelworks is not profitable, and the conversion won't solve that.

newsclues• 3 years ago

If jobs are lost and industries move to regions with less environmental protection regulations, can you not imagine how these policies will have the opposite impact as intended ?

willcipriano• 3 years ago

It is short term, India and China will produce more than you can cut, therefore global warming would still occur, just a bit later.

smooc• 3 years ago

Now let's see if Tata Steel will be true to it's words. They are trying to do the same in the Netherlands where it has been proven that they are emitting significantly more hazardous chemicals than allowed into the air after having being given subsidies to reduce them. This has lead to a significant higher rate of cancer close to the plant. Of course the government has been looking to other way cause... Jobs.

In the meantime they are being out competed by the Swedes with their hydrocarbon plant.

I wouldn't trust Tata Steel with a dime.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

The whole steelworks would probably close without this money, which is a subsidy to keep it open sugar-coated as help to decarbonise.

Edit: Also, apparently confidential guarantees were given to many large companies following Brexit. This might be one... (Port Talbot voted for Brexit, btw)

albertgoeswoof4• 3 years ago

It says they’ll save 3000 jobs

£500,000,000 / 3000 = £166,666

Average salary in port talbot is £28,000

Why not give those 3000 people 100k each and save 200 million?

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

Maybe they want more than 3 years' worth of money?

albertgoeswoof4• 3 years ago

It’s more than three years because it’s tax free (no sense in paying tax on money from the government), so more like 4 years.

4 years salary without having to work a day is an incredible deal

albertgoeswoof4• 3 years ago

Also Tata are going to invest another 700 million. That’s 1.2 billion pounds for only 3000 jobs.

So where’s the money going?

Presumably it will be used to subsidise costs to boost profits, pay landowners and owners of capital (eg trucks) rent, corporate bonuses etc.

But the headline just says the deal will save jobs and that that the government is doing it for the people.

Perhaps there is an upside for the public here, but when the government invests our money, they should lay out a clear business plan and communicate it responsibly to the public, instead of rhetoric and numbers that most people cannot comprehend

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

but when the government invests our money,

Should the government be in such investment business? And is this an investment? Or another bailout of sorts that'll ultimately benefit the shareholders? And upper management?

Half-a-billion is a significant amount of money.

_puk• 3 years ago

Given the impact on the surrounding areas (including a speed limit to "improve air quality" because that'll make a huge difference..), and the general film of black dust on everything in the locality, it really is worth £3500 per person in port Talbot (140,000 population as per Wikipedia) to improve their lives for years to come.

albertgoeswoof4• 3 years ago

But if you just gave the people the money the plant would shut down and there would be no more pollution…

Kognito• 3 years ago

I suspect mainly the concern is that steel production is a strategic resource. The intention is to maintain a domestic capability given how critical steel is to the modern economy.

It’s dressed up as mainly about the workers and going green because it’s good PR.

opportune• 3 years ago

This is a one-time capital expenditure, not a rate like a salary. The payoff time in terms of salaries is just 6 years. Seems like a good deal

Animats• 3 years ago

The Empire strikes back. The remnants of the UK steel industry, which once led the world, are being taken over by an Indian company.

_joel2• 3 years ago

A large chunk of the UK infrastructure isn't owned by the UK nowadays...

matthewfelgate4• 3 years ago

That is a lie.

itigtohft• 3 years ago

This actually happened a long time ago. Back in 2007, in fact.

adamm255• 3 years ago

Pretty much everything in the UK is owned by India, China, France or Germany. Or the UAE/Middle Eastern countries.

matthewfelgate4• 3 years ago

Don't be ridiculous.

ricardo812• 3 years ago

The article mentions the deal would reduce the UK's carbon emissions by 1.5%

From [0] the UK's steel industry apparently accounts for 2.4% of all emissions, so clearly a huge chunk of the (small) UK steel making industry.

I've seen guestimates of the total cost to fully decarbonise the country going into the trillions, so on face value this would appear value for money or perhaps low hanging fruit.

[0] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CDP-...

snewman• 3 years ago

Unfortunately you can't really rely on this sort of comparison between numbers obtained from different sources, except in the most unambiguous circumstances, which rarely arise for a complex topic such as sector emissions and cost of mitigation. The 1.5% and 2.4% figures may use different methodologies. The total-cost-to-decarbonize estimate probably entails a variety of unrealistic assumptions; it's hard to take into account future improvements in technology, all of the different ways the market will find to minimize costs, etc.

If you're interested, I discuss the general danger of working with such quick-grab numbers in https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers.

ricardo812• 3 years ago

Fair point.

FWIW from the same gov source "The blast furnace route forms the majority of UK and global steel production. In 2018, 82% of UK steel (5.9 million tonnes) was produced using the blast furnace route at Tata Steel’s Port Talbot site and British Steel’s Scunthorpe site. The Government estimated that 95% of iron and steel industry emissions (and around 15% of total industrial emissions) come from the Scunthorpe and Port Talbot blast furnace sites."

It does not differentiate between the two, though.

tomatocracy• 3 years ago

The article doesn't describe the difference in process between electric arc and blast furnaces properly. Coking/metallurgical coal isn't just used for heat in steel production but because it creates a chemical reaction which normal (thermal) coal doesn't.

With an electric arc furnace, you have to use methane to achieve direct reduction instead. It's possible to use hydrogen instead of methane to do this although that doesn't make sense from an emissions standpoint unless you have a source of H2 which is produced by electrolysis using a non CO2 emitting source of electricity (and moreover from a global perspective you would ideally also want to be sure that there isn't a better use of that electricity).

I'm not clear on if that's what's proposed here but I would assume not - as I would expect the UK government would be shouting about this very loudly if so given the level of hype there is around hydrogen.

kmlx• 3 years ago

here’s the government’s press release for anyone interested: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/welsh-steels-future-secur...

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Governments should give money for the RESULT.

TheChaplain2• 3 years ago

I propose you find employment within government or state agency, it's an eye-opening, and somewhat chilling experience.

But it does answer a lot of questions why things are as they are.

(Hint: The government goons we see in media every day are just the very tip of an iceberg. A rather rotten iceberg.)

karol• 3 years ago

The craze to remove random elements from the general mix continues. I personally would nominate Fluorine to be eliminated next.

bananapub• 3 years ago

that's a bad headline.

it's been given that much money to avoid a very embarrassing fight/mass sacking/corporate collapse for the government. tata has come and got the government to given them loads of cash before for the same reason.

paleotrope• 3 years ago

Tata Steel becomes Tata Iron after de-carbonization?

credit_guy• 3 years ago

So, they plan to switch from blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces. But there's a catch. Or actually two. The first is that the blast furnace smelts ore and produces iron and steel. That is energy and carbon intensive. The electric arc furnace processes recycled steel. That is much less energy and carbon intensive. You could say "great, a victory for recycling". But in reality is just moving the blast furnace to another part of the world. Every year the world produces some steel from recycled steel and some from ore. Switching from ore to recycled steel is not going to magically reduce the need for new steel. That new steel will still be needed, and it will be produced in China.

The second catch is that the electric arc furnace is carbon neutral only if the electricity that it uses is carbon neutral. The world is moving in that direction, so this is good. The only thing is that it's not the steel plant that's doing the heavy lifting, but the solar or wind plants that generate the green electricity. So, why the large subsidy to the steel plant? Their blast furnaces were at the end of their life, and they were going to replace them with arc furnaces anyway.

Well, after all it's a step in the right direction. Nothing is perfect.

defrost• 3 years ago

Just for a sense of scale I looked up the production stats:

    Port Talbot Steelworks is an integrated steel production plant in Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, Wales, capable of producing nearly 5 million tonnes of steel slab per annum.

    This makes it the larger of the two major steel plants in the UK and one of the largest in Europe. Over 4,000 people work at the plant.

Note the capable, other figures suggest it produces at most 4 million tonnes of steel per annum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Talbot_Steelworks

For that scale comparasion, though, I live in an iron ore producing state, one of the three largest global suppliers ATM, and we export about 800 million tonnes of iron ore (mainly to China) per annum.

That's 160x more (input) tonnage than the max Port Talbot output (just iron ore, not including the required coking coal for steel making and additional coal(?) for production energy.

Of course it's not all Uh-Oh evil China here - China is making steel at scale (at a mutitude of grades from high quality to shitty steel) for the world market, US and EU customers are consuming a large proportion of that steel.

Decarbonisation is hard - the numbers are large and the problem areas are dispersed across the globe.

matthewfelgate4• 3 years ago

Is this a good use of £500M of our money?

UK’s largest steelworks given £500M to decarbonise

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