Good news: the UK’s most polluting industrial site to close, reducing CO emissions by 1.5%2 of the whole country. Bad news: this comes at the cost of 2,800 job losses and the end of the UK’s ability to produce steel directly from iron ore.
Friday January 19, the Indian group Tata Steel announced the closure of its two blast furnaces in Port Talbot, Wales. His motivation is both financial and environmental. The site is currently losing almost 1 million pounds (1.16 million euros) per day. Tata recalls that it has invested 5 billion pounds in these facilities and its entire British subsidiary since its acquisition in 2007.
At the same time, the carbon footprint of the site – around 6 million tonnes of CO2 per year – which still runs on coke, a coal derivative, requires a change in technology. Tata announces that it will therefore close a first blast furnace in mid-2024, and a second at the end of the same year. Instead, he will build a furnace that works with a ” electric arc “which will produce steel from 2027. To do this, it will invest 1.25 billion pounds: 750 million pounds from its own pocket, to which the British government adds 500 million pounds.
“Difficult path”
The company rejected the unions’ proposal to keep one of the two blast furnaces operating until 2032, saying the cost was too high. The construction of the new facility is also simpler and less expensive if the entire location is closed. With new technology, CO emissions2 of the site will drop by 85%.
Tata, which employs nearly 8,000 people in the United Kingdom, including 4,000 in Port Talbot, will cut 2,500 jobs in the short term, with a further 300 jobs likely to be added within three years. “We are choosing a difficult path, but it is the right one”, assures Thachat Viswanath Narendran, the general director of Tata Steel. He emphasizes that his investment is “largest in UK steel production for a decade”.
Tata’s decision follows that of British Steel, the other British steel producer, which announced, in November 2023, the closure of its two blast furnaces, replaced by two electric arcs, which must be operational in 2025 The United Kingdom, once one of the world’s pioneers in the steel industry, will therefore no longer have any blast furnaces.
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