Steel vs Green
How do you square the vicious circle presented by two goals: industrial big-hitter and net zero champion?
That headline: no it’s not a heavyweight fight between an ageing has-been and a new contender, but it has the same feel about it.
The UK is trying to stand on its own, in control of its own manufacturing, a leader in high quality engineering, as it always has been. But there is a contradiction here, which is tearing us apart.
How can we retain our status as a manufacturing heavyweight if we can only do so whilst outsourcing all of the dirty jobs (like making virgin steel) to other countries? Other countries that will one day also want to move away from those dirty jobs, if the world is to save itself? Other countries that also could totally screw our supply chain if it decided not to supply us with steel anymore? Or hit us with price-hikes, because it can?
I was born in a steel town. Industry-wise, Consett was a one-trick pony town on a windy Durham hilltop. A town where you couldn’t hang your washing out on days when the red dust was belching from the smelter and cars all had the same rusty colour.
It’s not now of course. The steel works disappeared in a decade during the 70’s, having started in the 18th century making high quality swords for the swashbucklers of Europe.
Consett is now reinventing itself and cleaning up its act, now standing under clearer skies in the middle of lovely - if still windswept wild and woolly - Pennine countryside.
If you lived there, you be breathing better air than the babies born when I did. You just might not have a nailed-on job for life anymore.
It made the steel that built Blackpool Tower as well as Britains nuclear submarines. These days that same vital material probably comes from elsewhere in Europe. Or will do soon.
My question is, can Britain still maintain its position as the creator of the world’s finest engineering products, without controlling the entire supply chain of all the materials this requires?
Quality virgin steel cannot be made - yet- from recycled scrap in newer, cleaner Electrical Arc Furnaces. It currently still needs smelters fed with dirty stuff like iron ore, coking coal and limestone. EAF technology also needs a lot, of Electricity. Which also has to come from somewhere!
In time all this will change of course. But unless Britain stays in the game of producing virgin steel, we will probably also lose our position as a world leader in high-end engineering.
So before we let Scunthorpe and Port Talbot both bite the dust, someone needs to make the big decision on what role we want to play in the world: whether we want to be in the ring boxing with the big hitters, or whether we resign ourselves to handing the towel and water for other suppliers.
It’s not an easy decision. I wouldn’t want my grandchildren to be born under a dusty red sky as I did. But I would want them to be proud of what their ancestors created and thankful that we’d left a thriving manufacturing country for them to inherit!