BRITISH STEEL


The British Steel plant at Scunthorpe is the last blast furnace site operating in the UK.


Image credit: Baxter Media/ Shutterstock.com


at all. Instead, it is a form of recycling: it uses scrap steel as the main ingredient and passes a huge electric current through it to melt it, then pours the molten metal into moulds for casting. It is much less carbon-intensive than blast furnaces, cutting on-site CO2


are currently under way in Europe, including three in Sweden and four in Germany. The earliest is scheduled to come on-stream this year.


emissions by around 90%. It has, though,


some disadvantages. It relies on scrap steel – which, fortunately, the UK has in abundance; we even export it to other countries for their EAFs. We presently recover 10–11 million tonnes of scrap steel a year, of which just over 2 million tonnes a year is recycled in the UK and the remainder exported. More importantly, some high-grade specialist steels cannot easily be made by Electric Arc Furnace. The scrap steel feedstocks contain all kinds of unknown impurities, which can be fatal to some very specialised steels that are essential to, among others, the defence and the nuclear industries. If the UK is to continue to produce a wide range of steel products it has an unavoidable demand for ‘primary iron’ – that is, virgin metal iron or steel – to feed into the EAF process alongside or instead of scrap metal. Even steel for car bodies, railway tracks and beverage cans need a proportion of primary iron in the scrap. The third way of making steel is by Direct Reduced


Iron, or DRI. As with blast furnaces, it starts with iron ore. It heats it with natural gas, or perhaps in future with hydrogen; to produce, happily, the primary uncontaminated metal that specialised steels require. The products of DRI can also be fed into an electric arc furnace, either alongside scrap or on its own, depending on the final grades of steel required.


Replacing blast furnace iron with DRI reduces CO2 emissions but does not eliminate them entirely. DRI is a much newer technology. It is nevertheless a practicable one and is the focus of substantial investment across the globe. A dozen DRI projects


32 | September 2026 | www.hoistmagazine.com


Industry outlook With that as background, we can examine the current state of steel-making in the UK and make some guesses at the future also. First: do we need a UK steel industry at all? In any


likely scenario UK-produced steel is bound to cost more than far-eastern imports: labour costs and energy costs are necessarily higher, and environmental costs are part of that also.


Even so, the answer has to be Yes. We do need


a steel industry here. Darren Falkingham is group marketing manager of UK hoistmakers SCX. “For the construction industry such things as re-bar and rolled steel girders are standard and generic”, he says, “and UK users will probably buy the cheapest they can, whether imported from China or India or elsewhere. But for specialist users like ourselves that option is not possible. For example, we make hoists for the nuclear industry and nuclear demands total traceability for all components and all the materials that go into them. For that we need absolutely reputable sources and suppliers whom we know and trust. We cannot simply buy from the cheapest unknown far-eastern producer.” McDiarmid agrees: “People have at last come to


realise that to be a successful country and a secure country, in this uncertain world, you cannot rely on global trade anymore.” We have war in Ukraine and the Middle east; globalisation and free trade can no longer be taken for granted. That has been upended by unpredictable and arbitrary tariffs. President Trump will not be here forever, but the post-Trump world will not return to the pre-Trump certainties. “So, you have to have a steel industry.”


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