Tata, the owners of the steel works at Port Talbot in Wales, recently announced they were shutting down this historic plant, with the immediate loss of 3000 jobs. This will be devastating to the local community, as this is the town’s major employer. Previous rounds of redundancy have hit the town hard, this could well finish it off.
The right wing media have been quick to claim its the fault of net zero and definitely NOT brexit. However this is complete rubbish, as a former first minster for Wales has confirmed. And I’d be inclined to agree. You see I used to work in the labs at Port Talbot works, back in the 2000’s. And you know what we were working on? Climate change mitigation!
The company, then under the ownership of Corus Group, understood that climate change was something they were going to have to deal with eventually. So they put a lot of junior research staff on the task of determining the environmental impact of the plant. One my jobs was assessing the corrosion rates of our products in different climates, which allowed us to determine the useful service life of those products. Other colleagues were involved with directly measuring emissions from the plant, energy consumption, etc.
And overall, while yes Port Talbot works was a major source of carbon emissions, it wasn’t actually that bad in terms of emissions per ton of product. Towards the lower end of the scale globally in fact. And as I was leaving there were proposals floating around for how to improve things even further. For example, installing a CHP plant, which would generate both heat and electricity (both for the plant and local homes). This would produce a significant energy saving, lowering costs, fuel consumption and hence lower overall emissions.
However, installing a CHP plant (along with other changes) would have been expensive. It would pay for itself eventually, but there would be an up front cost. And that was a problem. Firstly Corus group, weren’t very good at making long term decisions. The company motto seemed to be “we used to be indecisive, but now we’re not so sure”. Secondly, the dumping of low cost steel into the UK and European markets by overseas competitors was eating into the companies margins. In fact this would eventually lead to the closure of Llanwern (a sister plant to Port Talbot).
While the EU was taking some action against this, the UK government didn’t do a lot. And that was under labour. Once they Tories took over it went from inaction to an outright snooze-fest . There was also the issue of the UK’s lack of a coherent energy policy, which under the Tories has swung from a spaff of whatever green policies sound like a good idea (and are only being announced because of a climate conference), to endorsing conspiracy theories against ULEZ and 15 minute cities.
This probably explains why the aforementioned CHP plant wasn’t installed until the early 2020’s (and a cut down version if it at that). There were a number of other initiatives under way to cut emissions however, which kind of suggests that the cost of net zero wasn’t the problem for Tata. It was something else. Now what could that be?
Well the primary output from Port Talbot was strip steel products. The sort of stuff used in the construction industry and car manufacturers. Both have taken a bit of a knock recently, most notably UK car makers, a number of which have announced (or threatened) closures, as they shift production over to Europe. And this is explicitly down to brexit. So it is not exactly rocket since to see how our aforementioned first minster is reaching this conclusion.
Furthermore, energy costs in the UK have risen sharply, which would have pushed up operating costs for the plant. Again, largely down to the UK’s lack of a coherent energy policy. Most notably a ban on onshore wind, which just happens to be the cheapest form of energy production (we’d also suggested back in the 2000’s installing a couple of wind turbines on waste ground on site).
The EU has also recently brought in new rules regarding “dirty” steel products, which means carbon credits have to be purchased to import them into the bloc. Which is a bit of a problem if you are outside the bloc (you know, because of brexit). Doubly so, as it means the UK is likely to become a dumping ground for steel the EU has now rejected. So its pretty clear why Tata reached this decision.
So while I wasn’t entirely surprised by this announcement, it was the speed of the brexiter apologists rush to judgement that caught my attention. Before I’d even heard of the closure, they were rushing out the excuse that it wasn’t due to brexit. Definitely not brexit, For sure, absolutely, scout’s honour! And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Any time any sort of bad news comes out, the brexiters are rushing in front of microphone to pin the blame on anything else other than them, the left, Greta Thunberg, woke, green energy, remoaners, the EU, etc.
Me thinks the lady doth protest too much! I put it to you this isn’t a coincidence. They know full well that brexit has been a total disaster. In fact they’ve always known. Farage etal went before the fishermen, farmers and workers at plants like Port Talbot, people they knew would lose everything due to brexit. And they lied to their faces. It is a criminal conspiracy. And if there was a single journalists with any integrity in this country, they would confront the brexiters about this, rather than pandering to them.
daryanenergyblog 