Ross Clark & The Madness of the Port Talbot fiasco
By Paul Homewood
.
Ross Clark offers more detail on the Port Talbot closure:
Such is the perversity of Britain’s net zero target. Real jobs are being sacrificed to achieve something only on paper.
Hurrah! The UK is just about to reduce its carbon emissions by a further 1.5 per cent. As for Wales, it is going to get even close to the holy grail of reaching net zero, with 15 per cent of its carbon emissions wiped off its slate in one go. True, there will be 2,800 job losses, and it won’t actually reduce global emissions – in fact, it will probably increase them. But who cares about such trifles when you have a legally-binding target of net zero to reach by 2050?
That pretty well sums up today’s announcement that Tata Steel is to close its two blast furnaces in Port Talbot, in preparation of building a new ‘green’ electric arc furnace that will open in a few years’ time. An electric arc furnace won’t really decarbonise steelmaking because it only does half the job. Steelmaking is a two-part process: first, extracting iron from iron ore to make pig iron, followed by turning the pig iron into finished steel. An electric arc furnace can help with the second part but not the first part. The new ‘green’ steelmaking works at Port Talbot will be reliant either on imported pig iron, or on scrap steel. It is, of course, a good thing to recycle steel, and this has been done for many decades. But a growing world economy can’t live on recycled steel alone.
The first part of steelmaking is the really dirty bit. To extract iron from iron ore you need a ‘reducing’ agent to combine with the oxygen in the iron ore and so remove it. In almost all the world’s steelmaking, the reducing agent used is either coking coal or gas – which creates large quantities of carbon dioxide as a by-product. That is why steelmaking is so carbon-intensive. It is possible that in future we may be able to make steel commercially using hydrogen as a reducing agent – in which case we could genuinely have steel that is zero carbon, or thereabouts. There are a couple of demonstration plants being built in Sweden and Spain to test this process. But it won’t be Port Talbot’s electric arc furnace doing the job.
The closure of Wales’s blast furnaces will take some emissions off the UK’s books, but only by transferring them onto another country, probably China’s. Looked at from a global perspective, the closure at Port Talbot will almost certainly increase emissions. Why? Because we will have to cart yet more Chinese-made steel across the world to the UK, and because Welsh electricity is less carbon-intensive than Chinese electricity – 70 per cent of which is generated by coal power stations. Then there is the small matter of 2,800 skilled jobs, the loss of which threatens to turn Port Talbot into a 1980s-style unemployment blackspot. The electric arc furnace will be able to offer employment to some existing steelworkers when it opens in a few years time, but it will never employ as many people as the blast furnaces.
The closure will also make Britain even less industrially self-sufficient – just at a time when the foreign secretary, David Cameron, is telling us that the world hasn’t been as dangerous for decades.
Such is the perversity of Britain’s net zero target. Real jobs are being sacrificed to achieve something only on paper.
https://netzerowatch.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=12196f91af&e=4961da7cb1
Ross Clark’s point about pig iron is highly relevant. Without any blast furnace, Port Talbot will have to buy pig iron, almost certainly from China or India.
There is also a secondary issue. I strongly suspect that Tata’s plans involve cutting production significantly, as they will no longer be able to make high quality steel just using scrap. If I am right, many of those 2800 job losses will be in the rolling and finishing mills, rather than just in the blast furnaces and coke ovens.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
While on the subject of electric arc furnaces anybody know why the amount of nuclear generated electricity has halved compared to a few months ago?
I had undestood some stations were being closed about now and the over cautious inspectorate suspended others because of minor issues with some graphite rods, of which there is redundancy built into in all stations..
WF and EB: you should be able to see the status of the nuclear units at the link below. The following information.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
A couple of units are off for planned refuelling. Torness R1 is due back in April and Heysham R7 is due back before end of January. Four units are offline at Heysham and Hartlepool, after some issues with a steam valve. The failure of one steam valve has resulted in the others being taken off for checks. These are due back between late January or early February.
Total UK nuclear installed capacity of 5GW is halved to 2.5GW when the UK is experiencing some of the coldest days in the year. This is not a good look for nuclear, and it was good fortune that we are in a reasonably windy period.
Existing nuclear units are all nominally 650MW, but GB now has four EPR replacements in progress (or starting) at 1500MW each. This 6GW will come with particular risks, including common technology and “single infeed loss” (too many eggs in one basket). For example, a perception of high lightening risk on the local network (or other operational risk factors) could take 3GW offline in one bite.
Last year’s biggest infeed loss due to a single feature was 1.3GW when NSL tripped out on 8th June. Frequency plunged from 50.1Hz to 49.63 Hz in a matter of a few seconds, but then was defended and gradually restored taking about 6 minutes to get back above 49.8Hz, the normal base of the operational range. Probably as well it started from 50.1Hz rather than 49.8Hz.
The biggest frequency event was on 22nd December, when an initial loss of 1GW on IFA1 was followed by considerable secondary losses for reasons that have yet to be officially explained (rumour suggests the brief loss of 2GW of Scottish wind), but the nadir was 49.275Hz, which is getting in range of blackout territory. It seems notable that the first lines of defence from batteries failed to perform as well as they had on almost all other frequency disturbances in 2023. The main provider of spinning reserve turned out to be pumped storage – which had been curiously absent in August 2019.
Interconnectors proved to be the most frequent and largest sources of frequency disturbance (including to the upside when losing NSL exports), with CCGT trips coming second and nuclear behind that.
I doubt we would see 3GW taken off line by throwing a switch because of a thunderstorm. If there was a perceived risk, output would be ramped down in a more orderly manner ahead of time, perhaps with a manageable loss level subject to more rapid turndown if needed left running. An interesting article on the design of the Arabelle turbines:
https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurebuilding-on-experience-1750-mw-arabelle-st-for-flamanville-3-epr/
I note they include a “house mode” for coping with grid disturbances.
RATS is interesting: evidently management decided that it was going to be able to turn a profit operating in baseload rather than merely relying on being asked to warm up to provide spinning reserve, and perhaps ordered more preventative maintenance than was put in place at West Burton and Drax, both of which saw trips when called upon in their last couple of operational years. Aged generators of whatever technology are always going to be more prone to outages, particularly when management has to balance remaining statutory or physical life against maintenance cost.
Our nuclear sites have been under the Damocles sword over the graphite moderator cracking issue, and decisions on more maintenance will have been deferred until clearance from ONR was obtained. It now seems that ONR are prepared to sanction some life extensions that will justify more maintenance.
Interesting information IDAU, but I should clarify the following.
“I doubt we would see 3GW taken off line by throwing a switch because of a thunderstorm.”
That’s not really what I meant to suggest, so perhaps I should expand.
Power station owners/managers have full discretion over the decision whether or not to operate their equipment. Price gives an incentive to operate, but there is no obligation.
Quite a common example is lightening risk on local networks, although there are other reasons why a unit could be withdrawn when it is otherwise technically capable of operating.
Sticking with lightening risk, units are designed to trip from full load, but there is extra risk of breaking something and being forced to take the unit offline for repair for a much longer period. When there is lightening risk, it isn’t uncommon (double negative) for owners to take the plant offline. It’s the balance of a known loss of availability and income, versus a reasonable chance of a bigger loss.
The System Operator might do the same for its own reasons.
For example, the ESO holds reserve to cater for things like “single infeed loss” , and this isn’t necessarily a local risk. For example, the ESO could reduce a large unit’s operating point because the cost of holding the required reserve is too great. This could easily be at times high demand and high prices, and when the availability of reserve capacity is low. It could easily be at times of low demand, when the cost of holding reserve units online against other economic signals could be too great.
From these perspectives, we need to consider the risks of having as much as 1.5GW vested in a single unit and having 3.0GW vested in a single location. The existing planned 4 EPR units come with quite a lot of risk that capacity will be lost in big bites. The “bite” we are talking about here could be 1.5GW or even 3.0GW.
For most generating plant, such a shut-down unit can be returned within a few hours after the risk has passed. Not so for nuclear. Once shut-down, the reactor needs around 3 days to recover its reactivity due to a phenomenon known as “Xenon poisoning”.
If that’s a fair concern for 4 EPR units (6.0GW), it should be no less of a concern if the decision is made (by government) to add two more.
What I want to challenge is the assumption that nuclear, particularly in large units and a single technology, lives up to the expectations of a perfect provider of secure capacity that many seem to be looking for.
Jordan, a very silly point but….there are a few typos that always make me smile. One is icebergs “carving” no doubt caused by a huge “calving” knife. The other is “lightening” (a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy) as opposed to “lightning” (an electrostatic discharge through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions,). Perhaps you should amend your spell “chequer”.
Thanks Ray. Noted. I can’t blame it on the ubiquitous spell chequer this time, and have to fess-up to a genuine inability to spell.
I seem to have been “effected” by one of the “affects” of using word processing software (one of my favourites).
It would be interesting to see how the single big failure issue is handled in France. They have many years of nuclear experience and sites with 2 or more reactors, Gravelines with 6 x 900MW being the most extreme case.
It’s a really good question Mike. I admit I have no idea how the French approach the above questions.
Interconnection might have a role to play in France (at least for some of the points) since France will be very well connected to neighbours.
But, as IDAU mentions in this discussion thread, as GB becomes more connected, the interconnectors may be associated with some of the recent frequency excursion events.
It is important to make sure some of these challenges are not just being passed around like a hot potato by lack of joined-up thinking. It suggests an ineffective industry, with higher costs which just get shoved onto the customer.
Without wishing to be contentious about it, I have expressed my doubts about free market efficiency in the power industry in previous threads. This could be an example, as I don’t have an impression of how free market decisions would effectively deliver large generating units and large interconnectors (which appear to have economies of scale on their stand-alone assumptions), and somehow consumer having the choice of electricity supplier is supposed to protect them against things like additional costs of single infeed loss due to a lack of coordinated approach to system balancing.
This doesn’t make me a supporter of nationalisation and centralised planning. But it does leave me unconvinced that there is a clear winner between investment by nationalised central planning, versus investment by privatised laissez-faire markets. Almost becomes a question of which one is the crappiest! (That’s another for the spell chequer Ray.)
” Last year’s biggest infeed loss due to a single feature ”
I can just about recall calculations from a few decades ago concerning rate of frequency drop and rate of recovery. As I recall, intial recovery always relied upon the inertia of generators that were spinning and loaded, followed by Dinorwig (no “grid” batteries at the time).
Shut downs due to steam valve fault and subsequent checks on similar reactors + refuelling I think
Correct:
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
As you say and at the link provided by Dave.
An issue with a steam valve at Heysham 1 caused the reactor to be shut down. They then deliberately shut down the other reactor at Heysham 1 and another 2 at Hartlepool to have a prod at the steam valves there. So, 4 out of 9 reactors down.
But then they took one reactor out at Torness for some planned reason, and another at Heysham 2 to refuel it. In the middle of the coldest couple of weeks so far this winter and while Heysham 1 and Hartlepool were AWOL.
So now we have 6 reactors down out of 9 and all but one of them for reasons that perhaps could have been delayed until the weather was a tad warmer? Or at least happened serially? Heysham 2 is theoretically restarting today.
Anyone know why they refuel and/or do planned maintenance on reactors in the middle of winter?
They could not delay checking the valves. This comment on another forum came from someone who works at Heysham:
“Basically one of the big valves had a spindle blow out so we need to confirm that all similar valves don’t have the same problem. While it has no nuclear safety significance, its a significant risk of harm to staff….. we all have to shutdown to refuel which means every three months each reactor has to shutdown, then due to the core ageing we have to shut them down to carry out core inspections.
We used to do 10TWhr of generation in a year, now we are doing well to do 7.”
Here is the really dumb thing – when it was time to move on from the original Magnox reactor design the CEGB put forward proposals for the AGR, the Westinghouse PWR, and even a Heavy Water design (SGHWR) operational at Winfrith. They preferred the PWR option but the then Minister for Energy (Tony Benn) over ruled their preference and chose the AGR. His stated reasons were that the AGR supposedly did NOT have to be taken offline to refuel (just reducing load) and the option to export a unique design.
The online refueling never really worked and was given up, plus we never exported a single unit!
Thanks, Mike. Where’s the pre-millenium gung ho attitude eh? Surround the valves with sand bags and carry on! I’m surprised AGRs now have 3 month refuelling cycles, after all one of them held the world record for continuous operation for a while.
Ray, indeed, and we have John Major to blame that we don’t have a useful fleet of Sizewell Bs now. Tony Benn – my father once had the pleasure of showing him round one of the Magnox plants, it would have been Oldbury or Berkeley. Having just had the gas circulators explained to him he turned to Dad and said ‘Interesting that you use gas – do you have some kind of deal with the Gas Board?’
I knw we have to keep “banging on” about this and similar issues but it is very tedious. Tryingtobring these issues to the attention of (almost all) journalists, all (virtually all) politicians and (most of) the public is soul destroying. I know we have to keep at it in case someone, sometime wakes up but oh dear.
I suppose it will be like the PO scandal – they will wait until almost all officials and Ministers have safely retired before it can be talked about. Tne Overton Window has become a little ajar but it will close soon enough. On PO the fashion is to blame Fujitsu. They are Japanese and far too polite to complain. PO senior management, PO IT specialists, PO auditors and litigators, Civil Servants and Mimisters will all get a pass on this.
Covid: a farcical “enquiry” designed only to bash Boris and push for more and harder next time. Oh, there will be a next time.
Immigration: talk about boarts (illegal, young men, about ten per cent of the problem) just keep talking and passing ineffective legislation so Tory candidates have something to talk about.
I’ve been watching the enquiry live as much as possible.
So far I haven’t seen any Japanese management.
The British Fujitsu staff, ex ICL I suspect, don’t come out too well extremely poor memory.
It’s shocking in a surprising way The Fujitsu staff from top management down appear to have been unaware that complex software and hardware systems has multitudes of subtle difficult to identify and solve. The PO staff appear equally ignorant of computer systems.
The denial that there could be a problem with the “System” seems as strong as the denial that climate “models” could be wrong. 97% = you’re the only one reporting this.
The redundant PO staff will slot seamlessly into the BBC Complaints team
For Marxists the end justifies the means and in this case “the end” is industry.
How much steel goes into wind turbines?
How much electricity goes into making the aluminum substructures for solar panels. (Aluminum has been described as electricity turned into metal.)
How much fuel goes into making silicon ingots for solar panels? Hint, it involves growing the silicon ingot for a week to 10 days at 2600 degrees.
How much energy goes into making synthetic graphite for the anodes in Li ion batteries. Slightly higher temps for almost as long as Si.)
How much energy do you lose importing LNG rather drilling for domestic supply? I suspect 20%.
There is nothing green about net zero. its an excuse to export emissions and working class prosperity and makes virtue of exploiting cheap labor and energy in foreign countries.
A first world economy with no steel making facilities- what a disgusting total shambles.
We have already closed down this country’s manufacturing processes and let them all move across to China.
Sadly, this is just the start- thousands of jobs in the motor industry will be next and then every other industry that relies on competitive energy prices.
The dingbats that promote Zero Carbon will slowly but surely ruin everything that we have held proud for numerous generations.
We have to stand up and fight them at every opportunity and do everything possible to expose and defeat their flawed agenda. It could become a life or death choice and we must speak and write against these idiots at every opportunity without fear nor favour.
Collapse has begun.
Without any blast furnace, Port Talbot will have to buy pig iron, almost certainly from China or India.
Tata is an Indian company.
Tata Metaliks has established itself as one of the leading Pig Iron manufacturers in India…
https://www.tatametaliks.com/tata-efee/product-range/
A company with many tentacles. They own Tetley tea. They don’t need to muck about with pig iron to wreck Britain.
Incidentally steel is an alloy with carbon (and often others), so hydrogen usage won’t produce “carbon free” steel.
Yes. I noticed that bit about there actually being a way to create carbon free steel.
There is a deal of confusion here in the references to pig iron. This process ceased long ago, molten iron from the blast furnace is inserted into Bessemer converters for transformation to steel, alloying elements being added at this stage. Typically this still molten steel is either poured into moulds to make billets and then rolled or used as feed in its molten state, cooled and fed directly into rolling mills to produce strip, plate etc for further processing.
If raw iron, in a solid form, is to be imported it must be remelted before it can be converted to steel – see Bessemer process above – requiring huge inputs of energy, probably comparable to that required to produce the ‘pig’ in the first place. Hence the reason for ‘continuous’ processes from ore to finished product, the original energy input – from coal via coke and gas – is retained for as long as possible.
Consequent on this steel can only be imported economically in its finished form, strip, plate, tubes etc.
Aiui (from Wiki), the Bessemer process is no longer in use. It was supplanted by basic oxygen steelmaking.
Part of the collateral damage from this closure will be the BOC-Linde air separation unit at Margam, just next door, which was built to supply oxygen to the steel process. That will eliminate the supply of co-products: Nitrogen; Argon; possibly rare gases.
Just one example of the fallout.
There will be far more than 2800 jobs lost as the ripple effect of unemployment spreads through Port Talbot.
Thanks Mike. My knowledge is dated. I was at RTB’s Llanwern on its’ construction phase, I knew the two engineers from BOC who installed the original oxygen plant. Later at Consett iron working on waste heat boilers. All gone, although I think the strip mills at Llanwern are still used using billets from Pt Talbot, is that right? I am a long way away now, Tasmania, so maybe now always up with the latest deindustrialisation in UK.
jongo; My knowledge is pretty dated too – that’s why I had to resort to Wiki rather than rely on dodgy memories.
Many years ago I worked for Air Products who were the oxygen supplier to Llanwern, mirroring the BOC installation at nearby Margam/Port Talbot. I’ve no idea what, if anything, is being produced at Llanwern these days.
Sadly, this is the Australian model……
Where will the electricity come from to power the arc furnace?
More seriously at what cost given the sky high cost of our electricity. I can’t see the arc furnaces ever being built.
NATO says war within 20 years, so when the stuff hits the fan and we need guns, Tanks, Ships etc etc, we have to ship the steel in by ship? We have a parliament staffed by traitors.
NATO has now updated its forecast to three years before they will be ready to go to war with Russia. Assuming NATOs goal in such a war would be unconditional surrender, the only outcome would be full on nuclear war.
It is getting tiresome to see the electorate in multiple countries choose to go to war without examining and agreeing more or less on what a definition of victory is.
You have to remember that Ed’s father was Ralph Miliband, a card carrying CP member who supported Stalin. Trump will win and take Congress. Zelensky will be told to make peace with Russia by not opposing the incorporation of the Don Bass into Russia. In the 1900’s we had the biggest navy in the world 260 ships compared to 60 nowadays. All the ships in 1900 were made with British steel cw now where some of the steel is Spanish. And we won’t have time to build a complete fleet as we did in WW1 & 2. Just some random thoughts
260 ships when I joined in the 60s, now we have 30. 28 if you discount the two sweepers colliding on Saturday. You could not make it up. As I said. Traitors leading us. Follow the money sadly.
And two non seaworthy aircraft carriers with insufficient aircraft. Needed in the med, unable to get their. Plus frigates with Spanish steel!!!!
I believe there’s a strong National Security case for maintaining our ability to produce steel, even if it’s against free market principles. I never thought I’d hear myself saying that.
“almost certainly from China or India.” Tata already have plans to increase production back home in India.
Managing materials choices – Fossil-free steel ……. Thyssen in Germany still going on about it on German TV and listen to this podcast https://www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com/podcasts/managing-materials-choices-fossil-free-steel-ams-expert-interview-with-ssab/45040.article