BRITISH STEEL
Basic Oxygen Steelmaking (BOS) is used across the world in every steel- producing country.
(Basic Oxygen Furnace) is used in every steel- producing country in the world including – so far – the UK where it has been hanging on by the skin of its teeth. The blast-furnace-powered steelworks at Port Talbot in South Wales were once the biggest in the world. Currently owned by the Indian Conglomerate Tata, its blast furnace was closed down in September 2024. That leaves the UK with only one operating blast furnace site. It is the British Steel plant at Scunthorpe. British Steel, despite its name, was until a few weeks ago owned by the Chinese group Jingye. In April 2025 they cancelled shipments of coking coal for it. Starving it of coke would have permanently destroyed it within weeks – blast furnaces cannot simply be turned off and turned on again. Days later, in order to save the blast furnace, and virgin steel making in the UK, and the 2,700 jobs that depended on it, the government passed an emergency bill taking control of British Steel. Politically, it was a surprisingly uncontested move.
Alasdair McDiarmid, assistant general secretary of the steel-makers’ trade union Community which represents steelworkers, witnessed it from inside the House of Commons: “They did it on a Saturday last April, it was the first time that Parliament had met on a Saturday since the Falklands war. I have never seen anything quite like it because it was hugely consequential and it should have been hugely controversial: here you had the government stepping in to forcibly take control of a Chinese company.” Such a thing had never happened before. “But actually, it had unanimous support from all sides of the house. Liberals, Conservatives, Reform, the Green party all supported that step. It went through without any dissent at all, which was really quite remarkable.” They had to do that at that time because the situation had become urgent. “Jingye were not a responsible owner,” says McDiarmid. “They were clearly running down the site; in the end they were trying to sabotage
it in fact by starving it of the vital raw materials. It would collapse if they ever turned the furnace off so the government had to step in at that time.” Full nationalisation followed in July this year. “Since that April there had been this tension where the government has been operating the site and controlling it but not owning it, so they couldn’t make any strategic investment decisions or sell it or anything like that.” And it seems Jingye were neither listening nor
playing. “The government gave them a fair offer to pick up their bags and leave but met with no response. And so emergency nationalisation was ultimately the only the only possible route. The government did the sensible thing. I think there is there is fairly broad consensus on that now,” says McDiarmid.
Steelmaking alternatives The second way of making steel is by Electric Arc Furnace, or EAF, which Port Talbot is currently transitioning to. It does not use iron ore as an input
A greener way to make steel, Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) recycles scrap steel.
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