The UK Steel Industry Succumbs To The Great Green Grift.

The UK is killing its primary steel industry in the name of Net Zero, with no effect on world carbon emissions which simply move overseas. Britain loses the jobs and destroys its economy for nothing.

On the last day of September, workers tapped the final batch of molten iron from the #4 blast furnace at Port Talbot Steelworks in Wales, ending 100 years of steelmaking in Port Talbot and ending the jobs of 1,900 workers.

The plan is to eventually replace the blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces, paid for with the help of a £500 million subsidy from the British taxpayers.

A similar move for the British Steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, the last of Britain’s primary steelmaking facilities, was planned for next year but has been postponed until 2032 because the required electricity will not be available.

The driving force behind these moves is a claimed reduction in carbon emissions. But it’s not a reduction in emissions at all, it’s an outsourcing of emissions to somewhere else.

In the steel industry, blast furnaces and electric arc furnaces have two completely different functions.

In a blast furnace iron ore (iron oxide, mostly Fe₂O₃) is mixed with coke and limestone in a vertical cylindrical vessel, and a blast of air is passed through the mixture. The coke reacts with the limestone and with silica in the ore to produce slag and carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide passes up through the furnace where it reacts with the iron ore, stripping it of oxygen and making elemental iron and CO₂. The product of the blast furnace is pig iron which is processed in a Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) to make steel.

The electric arc furnace does not make steel from iron ore, its raw material is scrap steel or iron. It only melts the steel so that it can be cast into new shapes. It’s a process for recycling steel, not for making steel.

If there were enough scrap steel to satisfy world demand, then all blast furnaces would shut down and all steel would be melted in arc furnaces. However, the availability of scrap limits the use of arc furnaces, so seventy percent of the world’s steel demand is provided by new steel made from iron ore.

The closing of Britain’s blast furnaces doesn’t change the amount of new steel that is made in blast furnaces, it simply moves that production offshore, probably to China. There will be no reduction in world CO₂ emissions from the closure of Britain’s primary steelmaking industries.

However, there is another process that can make iron from iron ore. It is a process called direct reduction, or DRI. It reproduces the reactions that take place in the upper portion of the blast furnace shaft.

DRI plants use iron ore pellets, typically a slightly higher grade than those used in a blast furnace. The reducing agent can be powdered coal, syngas made from coal, reformed natural gas, or hydrogen, or a mix of those.

A technical paper, published in the Journal of The Royal Society of Chemistry last year, presents a detailed analysis of the emissions and costs associated with DRI steelmaking using both natural gas and “green” hydrogen.

The results for natural gas DRI are presented graphically below:

The estimated cost of $582.18 per tonne is close to the current price of steel billets in Europe, the process could be competitive if it had a guaranteed supply of reasonably priced and readily available natural gas.

The estimated emissions of 1.32 Kg CO₂/kg of steel compare favourably with emissions of 1.99 to 2.23 Kg CO₂/Kg for the blast furnace option. Although a long way from approaching Net Zero, the natural gas option does provide a 34 to 41% real reduction in emissions versus zero reduction for the option of moving the primary steel production overseas.

Using “green” hydrogen instead of natural gas would reduce emissions by an estimated 76% (most of the remaining emissions would be off-site in the mining and making of iron ore pellets), but it needs a price of $1.63/Kg of hydrogen to break even with the natural gas option. Anyone who has read my previous article will know that “green” hydrogen does not exist and is unlikely to ever exist at prices that can support its use in steelmaking.

However, DRI is probably the only viable option for reducing primary steelmaking emissions. A pragmatic approach would use natural gas and add hydrogen to the mix if it ever became available at the right price.

If only Britain had politicians who were not religiously bound to the unachievable and unnecessary concept of “Net Zero” emissions.

If only they would take a realistic approach to emission reduction, doing what is sensible and practical for world carbon emissions rather than throwing taxpayer money away to simply move their own emissions overseas.

If only Britain had a reliable supply of reasonably priced natural gas, like Norway has in the North Sea, a reliable supply that would give industry the confidence to move forward with capital projects without the fear of future exposure to world gas prices.

Maybe then, Britain could have a steel industry, well-paying jobs and a robust economy.

As a footnote: German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp has been planning a DRI plant but is now considering cancelling the project and returning a 500 million Euro subsidy. Among the factors in that decision, no doubt, are the realization that cheap “green” hydrogen will not happen and that relying on future European natural gas prices is risky.