Coke

[victor]

So the govt won't allow a new coal mine which would have produced coke for the steel industry,but have no problem getting coke from Japan on a diesel powered ship at a cost to the UK taxpayer of £7 million pounds.
Who did the sums for this ,Reeves?

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[Workingman]

The mine would take years to come online when the need is now.

Most of our 5.4 million tonnes of coking coal comes from Australia and the USA. The stuff from Japan is actually from Australia but coked in Japan. It is minuscule in the overall scheme of things.

But the UK is rich in iron ore deposits and coal. We should be doing this in our own back yard not farming out the CO2 emissions to all and sundry.

Ah, but that would show up the net-zero scam for what it is. 11 April 2025

[cromwell]

We have just outsourced our carbon emissions to other cuntries and great and increasing cost to ourselves; and all so some fools of poiticians can feel virtuous about themselves.

[TheOstrich]

Parliament is being recalled on Saturday to debate the re-nationalisation of British Steel.

Good. We simply cannot let our only means of producing steel in this country disappear.

[Workingman]

Most British Steel, except for specialist steels, for which we are world leaders, comes from recycled steel. That's the stuff we once threw away as scrap. We apparently do not need to import more virgin steel than we did when we were producing our own.

The world has billions of tons of scrap steel just waiting to be recycled. It really does not need much more virgin steel, its ore mining and refining, as it once did.

[cromwell]

There's no plan.
Everything is reactive, not proactive. Starmer is acting now to try and get a bump up in the polls; reacting to a political stimulus. If he lets Scunthorpe steelworks close before the local elections there's a few hundred more councillors that he will lose.

If Scunthorpe matters, why didn't Port Talbot matter? Why was the plant there allowed to close? And to close to almost a dead silence from media and politicians alike?
If we are to continue making steel in the traditional matter instead of recycling it, why didn't the Labour party get fully behind the proposed Cumbrian coal mine, which would have produced coking coal for our steel industry?

Won't a steel industry hamper our "drive to net zero"? Are we still actually going to go for net zero?
Who knows. But a coherent economic plan would be nice, please and thank you.

[Workingman]

The Cumbrian mine will not be productive for years.

If the UK goes for recycling old steel then coking coal is not needed. The furnaces will be all electric, but that brings in another problem.

Electric furnaces require lots of power and the local grid cannot supply it. It will have to be produced on site, and that cuts out windmill and solar power. Furnaces need to be hot all year round - day and night. SMRs might work.

Net-zero it is not. The thing does not exist if we produce things; not for you nor me, not for a home, a hamlet, a village, a town, a city, a country nor a continent.

There are too many of us wanting things that we do not need.

[cruiser2]

Starmer and the Labour MPs think that passing a law on a Saturday will save the furnaces at Scunthorpe.

But I know you cannot just switch them on and off like a domestic gas or eletric oven. They need continuos supplies of fuel and rtaw materials,
with a unbroken supply chain.

As someone has said, MPs could not run a P*** up in a brewery

[cromwell]

According to the news the ship carrying the coking coal to the steelworks is stuck somewhere.
Let's hope it gets unstuck fairly soon or else the furnace shuts down, and that's that.

[TheOstrich]

So many rumours, and rumours of rumours, around at the moment.

I thought I heard somewhere that freighters with supplies of coking coal and iron ore were actually berthed at Immingham waiting to discharge (subject to receiving due payment), and there was another collier en-route somewhere off the coast of Africa and they were sending a Royal Naval vessel out to escort it?