Saving Scunthorpe Can steelworks forge path to sustainability?

The government has taken control of British Steel, so averting the closure within days of the UK's last two blast furnaces.

- Jasper Jolly

However, the takeover leaves a big question: what happens next?

Steep losses at British Steel prompted its Chinese owner, Jingye, to decide last month to close its blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, thus ending the production of "virgin" steel in the UK. The government stepped in with emergency legislation, passed in a single day last Saturday, to stop that.

The legislation has given the industry, workers and politicians time to work out how to build a sustainable UK steel industry that makes money, while minimising carbon emissions.

Electric arc furnaces The future for Scunthorpe, if it is to have a future, will almost certainly be the electric arc furnace (EAF). Blast furnaces use coal to strip oxygen from iron ore to make iron, which is then refined into steel. The oxygen combines with carbon, eventually to be vented into the atmosphere as planet-heating carbon dioxide. By contrast, EAFs use electricity to melt down scrap steel from sources such as old cars and demolished buildings.

That route to decarbonisation has already been chosen by Tata Steel at Port Talbot in south Wales: it closed its two blast furnaces last year to make way for electric arc replacements.

Dan Marks, a research fellow who has studied steel at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence thinktank, said the shift to EAFs was inevitable, but governments had taken too long to act. "This was something that needed to be done in 2019," said Marks. Back then it was clear that only a few years remained for the four operating blast furnaces at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe. "Nobody is going to invest in blast furnaces over a 25- to 30-year commitment," he said.