Britain’s Port Talbot steelworks closes last blast furnace

London — Britain’s biggest steelworks will end production later on Monday, when the final blast furnace at Port Talbot in Wales will close after more than 100 years of steelmaking, at a cost of almost 3,000 jobs.

The closure of the last blast furnace at Port Talbot, once the largest steel works in Europe, is the culmination of decades of decline in Britain’s steel industry, which has struggled to compete with low-cost imports.

Showing the scale of the challenge, India-owned Tata Steel had been losing £1m a day before it began the process of shutting down its facilities.

The Tata Steel-owned site will now be subject to a three to four year-long decarbonisation plan to build an electric arc furnace which will make steel from scrap, a £1.25bn project backed by £500m of British government funding.

Britain’s transition to net zero is changing the country’s industrial landscape.

Steelworkers union Community said in a statement that the closure of the final blast furnace was “the end of an era” and called it “an incredibly sad and poignant day”.

Another company, British Steel, which is Chinese-owned, continues to make virgin steel at its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, northern England, but it is also in talks with the government about shifting to cleaner manufacturing.

The government has said it wants to invest £2.5bn in the steel industry and it will publish a strategy on its plans to boost the sector next spring.

The switch to electric steelmaking is expected to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by 1.5% as Port Talbot’s coal-fired plant is the country’s biggest single carbon emitter.

Reuters