Essay by Eric Worrall
Green economic absurdity at its finest.
ANDREW NEIL: Port Talbot has been sacrificed to the altar of Net Zero – which is why Labour’s crocodile tears are hard to stomach
PUBLISHED: 09:00 AEDT, 20 January 2024 | UPDATED: 21:34 AEDT, 20 January 2024
…
Port Talbot is the latest victim of the Tory Government’s headlong rush towards Net Zero carbon emissions which has pushed up British energy prices and made what’s left of our heavy industry uneconomic.
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Port Talbot is the UK’s largest steelworks. It’s owned by an Indian conglomerate, Tata Steel, which, with British Government encouragement, is replacing its blast furnaces with an electric arc furnace that will emit less CO2.
It also requires less labour, hence the 2,500 job losses, most of which will go in the next 18 months. These losses are the direct consequence of the Government’s Net Zero strategy.
The Tories are so keen on pursuing it that they’re even stumping up £500 million of taxpayers’ money to help Tata meet the £1.25 billion cost of converting to the electric arc process.
So, in effect, the Government is using our money to pay Tata to shed jobs. Such is the zealotry behind Net Zero. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says the alternative is the complete closure of the plant — and it’s true that Port Talbot has been losing Tata money for years.
The irony is that decimating our heavy industry does not, in fact, reduce global CO2 emissions. It is reckoned that converting Port Talbot to greener electric arc production will cut our CO2 emissions by 1.5 per cent.
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Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12984989/andrew-neil-Port-Talbot-sacrificed-alter-Net-zero.html
I used to think Arc furnaces are only good for recycled steel, but Arc furnaces can apparently process iron ore, though I couldn’t find any information about the economic viability of this ore smelting process.
Whether the new Arc furnace is only used for recycled steel, or whether they attempt a full ore to steel process, melting steel with electricity requires lots of cheap electricity.
But Port Talbot is in Wales, and Wales has a problem with electricity. According to a report by the Welsh government produced in March last year, Wales has high electricity costs.
Does the British or Welsh government plan to subsidise the electricity bills of a foreign steel company, while their own people are suffering and struggling to pay household bills?
The press statement from Tata steel, the company which owns Port Talbot, suggests a transition period in which the company would receive half finished steel products from overseas, while evaluating whether steel production should continue at Port Talbot – so that $500 million agreed subsidy may not even have secured a promise of an ongoing steel business.
I’m guessing even more money will be demanded in the near future, to keep this taxpayer funded boondoggle afloat.
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A green job is a job lost and a a hefty premium paid for it
Only the workers have complained. And it seems they’re on their own.
By my calculations, if the UK government removed every single Net Zero law and regulation and then arranged for every window in Britain to be smashed, there would be a massive net gain for the UK economy. It would cost a few billion to replace the windows. That tells you how destructive Net Zero is. But of course, they don’t actually need to do Net Zero or smash windows, they could simply govern the country reasonably. Is that really too much to expect?
“They could simply govern the country reasonably.Is that really too much to expect?”
Yes.
I can’t think of a single British government policy that is actually working.
Not one!
Is the British Government taking advice from the Biden Administration, or the other way around? Neither government has a policy that actually works for the benefit of the people being governed. How could both governments get it that wrong on their own at the same time?
No, orders are issued from on high – Davos, the home of World Fascism in the Swiss mountains.
I think the job ratio here used to be ONE green job destroys THREE real jobs as the green jobs are non-productive non-jobs that are no benefit to society.
On a similar note .. President Biden’s first official act was the termination of Keystone XL pipeline, with an immediate loss of about 14,000 unionized jobs.
Let’s continue repeating that fact! Back to $2,50/gal. please.
As most self respecting scientists know, man-made carbon dioxide has virtually no effect on the climate. It is a good gas essential to animals and plant life. Provided dirty emissions are cleaned up, we should be using our substantial store of fossil fuels while we develop a mix of alternatives including nuclear power to generate energy. There is no climate crisis, it has always changed and we have always adapted to it. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were many times higher during the last mini ice age. There was no industrial revolution then to be the cause . We have no control over the climate. The sun and our distance from it have by far the most effect. Most importantly, Net Zero Policy will do nothing for the climate either. Countries like China, Russia and India are sensibly ignoring it and using their fossil fuels. They will be astonished at how we are letting the power elites, mainstream media and government implement this Policy and Agenda 21 to needlessly impoverish us as well as causing great hardship and suffering.
I’d surely up-vote you Sean, but for this bit:
”Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were many times higher during the last mini ice age.”
Atmospheric CO2 has indeed been many times higher in the past, when temperatures were cooler, warmer, or about the same. But it was many millions of years ago.
Generally CO2 levels drop during a glaciation and rise as temperatures warm. If we look back to the Ordovician period (nearly half a billion years ago), there was an ice age in conjunction with rising CO2 concentration. So perhaps that anomaly is what you had in mind.
The last “mini ice age” (perhaps you mean the Little Ice Age) ended about 175 years ago and CO2 levels were quite a bit lower then than today.
What matters most is that you were right in what you said: There is NO CLIMATE CRISIS!
On the contrary, there is a climate crisis. The world is as cold right now as it has ever been without being in a full blown ice age.
We are also only 250ppm CO2 atmospheric content away from certain extinction.
No doubts, no questions, no computer models. When atmospheric CO2 gets to around 150ppm every meaningful life form dies.
I don’t know what future 1,000ppm atmospheric CO2 holds, but I’ll take my chance with that, rather than the certainty of the alternative.
To smelt iron ore requires a reducing agent. Usually that reducing agent is carbon, in the form of coke, which is admixed with the ore, but electric arc furnaces themselves do not contain any carbon except perhaps for the electrodes, so again carbon (probably in the form of coke) will have to be added to carry out the reduction as in a blast furnace. Therefore there will still be CO2 emissions, the only saving is that electricity provides the heat for the process instead of some of the coke as in a blast furnace. Pretty much a waste of time. Good luck to them.
Electric arc furnaces using carbon electrodes to carry the power into the metal. These burn away slowly – guess what it makes? You can also melt steel in induction furnaces. However, this is very expensive and generally only done for specialty metals or where you don’t want contamination of the melt so in a vacuum.
The “carbon free” reducing agent of choice is hydrogen. This has been done in a few mills, One of the Swedish ones is offering it, but at a very high price. No doubt the hydrogen has to be made inefficiently by electrolysis.
The other thing that uses a lot of energy in a mill with rolling capability is all the flames to heat up the steel to red heat and keep it hot through the process. No doubt, that will need to be hydrogen as well. .
“so again carbon (probably in the form of coke) will have to be added to carry out the reduction”
No. The reductant is usually natural gas, with about half the CO2 emissions. From the AIS, where in the US 70% of steel is from EAFs:
This is Nick admitting that carbon is essential in the making of steel !
Electric arc.. hint… need to make the electricity first..
I wonder how much of the USA’s electricity for EAFs comes from COAL and GAS.
PS, Great to see China and Idia doing such a sterling job providing much needed atmospheric CO2.
America needs to catch up and stop being so slack.
EAF’s do not use natural gas or iron ore.
Many mills use DRI which is produced from iron ore as a feed to the furnace. This process uses natural gas or coal to reduce the iron ore.
Of course, you are left with significant waste from this process.
Port Talbot will not have a DRI plant and even if it did, South Wales isn’t a great place to produce a pyrophoric product.
They will use high value scrap steel as primary feed and will add lime, coke and other metals as well as home produced scrap to produce the grades required.
To make the 3.5 million tonnes, they will probably need 3 furnaces, 100 to 150 tonne capacity. The electricity supply has to be dedicated and constant. A minute downtime on a furnace can cost many thousands of pounds.
Carbon in the electrodes is immaterial. They wear out and are regularly replaced.
Calling EAF steel “green” is just a dumb catchphrase.
There is no point in discussing matters of the physical with the great Nick.
He is omnipotent and all seeing. There is nothing about which Nick does not know in the most intimate detail.
Nick is here to educate and inform us all. He is a blessing we are unable to resist. Nick represent’s ‘the collective good’. Are you not aware of his generosity?
Nick is what we mortals simply do not deserve, or want.
Nick is an expert in the steel making process.
How we are blessed for Nick to walk amongst us.
No, I just find out stuff and bring you the links – here from the American Iron and Steel Insitiute
Cherry-picking just those tiny parts that suit your evil, degenerate, anti-human, society-destroying, marxist agenda.
Nick you link doesn’t work. However, are the arc furnace figures you quoting the production of pig iron from iron ore? Or is it just the conversion of pig iron to steel phase. My understanding is most of the pig iron production is still coal – coking coal just like that exported from Newcastle. Most of the steel – China, India, Korea use the coal method. At a lot of steelworks, the molten metal goes directly from a blast furnace to a Bessamer convertor or an open heath furnace. No casting of pigs.
As the post is about Port Talbot, they are stopping making iron from ore and want to just make it from recycled steel.
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2024-01-19/what-is-a-blast-furnace-what-is-an-electric-arc-furnace
Sorry about the link – I gave it again just above. It is
https://www.steel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/AISI_FactSheet_SteelSustainability-11-3-21.pdf
They say
“Current sustainability advancements in domestic steel production include using direct reduced iron (DRI) and hot briquetted iron (HBI) in both integrated and electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking. HBI and DRI use natural gas as a reductant and reduce CO2 emissions vs. pig iron. “
Nick – you are correct that natural gas is used in the steelmaking process at US furnaces so they don’t need coal. The natural gas there can be very cheap, especially after the fraccing boom. However, you seemed to have missed from the link you gave “In 2020, imported steel accounted for nearly 28 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, almost 9 million metric tons more than if the steel had been produced at average U.S. emissions levels.”
The amount of imported steel has gone up because US Steel is getting too expensive to make so they are offshoring their emissions.
https://www.steel.org/2022/02/steel-imports-up-43-in-2021/
Most of the steel comes from Canada, which I didn’t know, but there they use coal/ coke to make it from iron ore. However, Canada imports pig iron mainly made in the USA!.
https://canadiansteel.ca/files/resources/Golder-Report-CSPA-NRCan.pdf
In a steel mill, the generally use only natural gas to reheat and maintain heat throughout the process but often coal or coke particles in their iron ore pellets as both reductant and source of heat.
In the US/ Canadian efforts to reduce emissions, the steel has become more expensive so is being replaced by imports made with coal. Same problem with Europe and Port Talbot. And that is the problem. Virgin steel or the coal for steelmaking hasn’t gone down. And the US government wants to get rid of natural gas.
“The amount of imported steel has gone up because US Steel is getting too expensive”
Your link says that it went up from 2020 to 2021. The reason of course was that Trump was defeated and his tarriffs removed. A reason Canada was the main source was favorable tariff treatment.
US Steel manufacture has had cost difficulty for a long time, unrelated to energy costs or EAFs. From
here is a graph of imports since 2005, There is a GFC dip, but otherwise no obvious increase in imports:
Direct reduced iron (DRI), also called sponge iron, is produced from the direct reduction of iron ore (in the form of lumps, pellets, or fines) into iron by a reducing gas which contains elemental carbon (produced from natural gas or coal)
Hot-briquetted iron (HBI) is a compacted form of DRI designed for ease of shipping, handling, and storage.
Nick is just copy/pasting stuff he doesn’t understand very well at all.
Exactly;
The link we’re given:
https://teara.govt.nz/en/diagram/5885/electric-arc-furnace
is beyond childish, it says:The electric arc furnace is used to reduce iron from iron ore. Heat is generated from an electric arc between electrodes. Oxygen is blown into the furnace, and lime and other materials are added to combine with the impurities and form slag.
If those are Carbon electrodes making the arc, you’re running them to white hot.
Blowing Oxygen in there is the very last thing anyone would do, those electrodes would burn so fast as to explode.
And what these ‘other materials‘ are just beggars belief
In any case, how would you ever strike the arc in the first place?
To to that you need 2 materials that conduct electricity.
Okaaaay, the ‘electrodes’ will conduct but Limestone, Iron ore, Oxygen and ‘other materials’ don’t..
OMG, I’ve *just* worked it out..
The link we’re given points to an electric Bessemer Furnace (hence the Oxygen input)
It’s for turning Pig Iron (the output of a coal fired blast furnace) into proper steel by reducing it’s Carbon content.
The ‘other materials’ are additions to the steel to make what you want once you’ve burned off all the carbon
They might be,
Chromium for stainless steel,
Vanadium for tools,
Carbon for high tensile steel (railway tracks)
or (I think) Rhenium for jet engine turbine blades
(Nobody in any of this have a frigging clue what they’re talking about do they –
this is Planet Stupid, Ignorant & Dumb)
Why on Earth would you wish them luck?
The story doesn’t say why Tata Steel is losing money. We can all guess high energy prices, labor issues, competition from other manufacturers, over regulation, poor management in other words it could any or all of the above or something else. The question is how is an electric arc furnace going to solve these issues. My guess is it can’t.
High energy and cheaper competition is why steelmaking here is losing money. And I agree that the electric arc furnaces won’t be a solution because it doesn’t solve the problem. They will use the taxpayer cash to close the plant down and then when asked why the new plant is not going ahead, just shrug and say ‘uneconomic’.
Who needs jobs when you can pay Asian countries to employ people against their will?
I hope the British enjoy being colonized economically. Their wallets are little green eco-systems to help develop India and China.
It seems almost karmic to see that the last blast furnace in Great Britain belongs to an Indian company and that they are in effect being paid by the government to shut it down.
Could you conger up a better metaphor for national economic suicide?
“conjure”, I think.
Yes, thanks
Not sure Rich didn’t mean “conger”.
When it comes to economic suicide, the UK is just at the front of the conger line
This way to the cliff edge…
To be fair, we have closed down most of our industry already so have little left to lose. This puts Germany in the lead as almost weekly there is news of a bankruptcy, plant closure, production shift abroad, short time working, increase in the cost of living – like a full on Sri Lanka.
Did some quick research before commenting. Port Talbot was already losing money for Tata before this move. Shutting the two blast furnaces will leave the UK as the only G20 country without primary steel production capacity. The arc furnace—if actually built—will only reprocess scrap steel. Arc furnaces cannot be operated on intermittent renewables, so are not that green in reality. The jobs lost will be about 2800 over the next 18 months according to the union. Tata getting the humongous green Tory subsidy was financial icing on the cake.
“The arc furnace—if actually built—will only reprocess scrap steel.”
The EAF is often fed with direct reduced iron produced on site with a reducing gas, probably mostly methane, with lower emissions.
“ Arc furnaces cannot be operated on intermittent renewables, so are not that green in reality.”
No. From here:
“EAFs have several operational attributes that can be exploited to complement the variability of wind and solar. EAFs run in batches, and these can be scheduled for when electricity is cheaper – when strong winds coincide with low demand, for example. EAFs consume a huge amount of electricity, so power prices are the single biggest operating cost and a major price driver for steel produced from recycled scrap.
An added benefit is that EAFs can change their power consumption very quickly by adjusting their instantaneous melting power rate during operation. This enables very fast demand response, meaning EAFs can provide valuable services to grid operators without impacting the quality or safety of the steelmaking process.
Therefore, the additional cost of electrifying steel with renewable power can be offset against the revenue accrued from providing ancillary services to the grid operator. Adding together income from multiple grid services such as spinning reserve or frequency response is known as ‘revenue stacking’.”
I accept arc furnaces are likely less sensitive than aluminium pots to power cuts, but this is still no way to run a furnace. Wind intermittency will still cause tremendous problems, many steps of steel processing require multiple days of prolonged and steady heat, such as heat treating to modify the carbon content of the steel. At the very least an intermittent energy supply will increase the capital cost in relation to profits, by increasing downtime relative to furnaces with cheap, reliable coal power which can operate 24/7.
Nick STILL hasn’t figured out that wind and solar are highly intermittent.
And STILL does NOT understand manufacturing processes.
There’s an added bonus for the green ecoloons. The Cumbrian coal mine will no longer be needed.
West Cumbria Mining plans to produce 2.8m tonnes of coking coal a year at Woodhouse colliery in Whitehaven for use by “steelmakers in the UK and EU”
No blast furnaces no need for the coking coal.
Yes, 80% of the coal was to be exported.
A power cut in an EAF meltshop is called ‘panic stations’.
One furnace will hold over 150 tonnes of molten steel and maybe 20 tonnes of molten slag. If that freezes in the furnace, then the business is gone.
It is a rush to tap the slag and pour the steel into a ladle and then onto the ground in a special emergency pit.
PT will probably need 3 furnaces.
Steel making may be a batch process but in reality it is a continuous process. The plant economics are based on the number of furnace taps made in the year. This is based on a tap-to-tap time. If this is delayed even by 10 minutes on a regular basis, the economics of the plant and down-stream processing are threatened.
Nick has copied and pasted gibberish from some energy journalist who doesn’t have a clue about what he is talking about.
Way back in my youth, I worked for a year in a foundry with electric arc furnaces. They were only small ones as it was a specialty steel maker, 10t capacity from memory.
We had one power cut while I was there. The immediate reaction was to tilt the furnace by the handwheels and pour all the melt into the sad lined ladle pit. Like you write, A freezeup would have been devastating.
Also learned there that one has to be wary of doing melts with only recycled steel if you want to meet the increasingly tighter metal specifications. Contaminant levels rise and it doesn’t take much for the steel to go out of spec – from memory, sulphur or phosphorus above 0.03% rejects it. for many applications like where it will be subsequently welded.
“A power cut in an EAF meltshop is called ‘panic stations’.”
The issue here is not a power cut. Despite all the wailing here, power cuts due to fluctuating renewables do not occur, without some other disasters that would have caused a power cut anyway (eg Texas). Instead, the price goes up. You aim for a period of cheap electricity. If you miss, you pay more. The skill is to come out ahead on average.
Nic
Why did they have to reduce power supply to all the Victorian aluminium smelters a while back – even closed pot lines?.https://www.afr.com/politics/victoria-faces-more-power-outages-as-extreme-heat-hits-45000-victorian-sa-homes-20190125-h1agxf – involuntary outage is a cut isn’t it?
But the main problem is the “cheap” unreliables make the power price to the user too expensive. That is why the smelters are leaving Australia and UK. Going to places supplied by coal generated electricity. .
Chris,
Your link says why:
“The Australian Energy Market Operator ordered mandatory load shedding of about 100 megawatts from the Portland smelter from 1pm AEDT and 200 MW from about 60,000 customers across a vast swathe of Melbourne suburbs from midday as the power system struggled to plug a supply gap of about 400 megawatts with about 2000 MW of thermal generation offline.”
The problems were, mainly, thermal offline, plus huge demand in the heat, which would be a problem for any kind of generation. There is nothing to say renewables failed.
Alcoa has signed up to RERT. That means they undertake to lower their usage at critical times. They get well paid for that.
Nick you were very selective in your reading. It also says this “The failure of so many thermal power stations exacerbated the shortage of wind generation in SA on Thursday “
The stations that were offline weren’t because they had broken down – forced outages. In the days leading up to it, they had been switched off as with all the wind blowing, running at minimum load was economic.
Then the wind stopped. That is why it is unreliable. Coal plants can’t start that fast so there was a gap in the generation.
You forgot to mention all the subsidies the smelters get because their power is so expensive.
“shortage of wind generation in SA on Thursday”
Portland is in Victoria and has a supply contract with Loy Yang A. Your quote continues:
“The failure of so many thermal power stations exacerbated the shortage of wind generation in SA on Thursday and underlined the vulnerability of ageing plants to extreme heat. A second 370 MW unit unit at EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn plant went offline early Friday for repairs to a boiler tube.”
Nick 40° isn’t that hot for thermal plant in Australian summers. They handled that for years previously without problems.
Yallourn on the Friday was a forced outage. Normally they could have covered it with reserves, but they were already in LOR2 because the wind hadn’t delivered. That is why wind/ solar is aptly named unreliable. It wasn’t a forced outage, it just wasn’t there.
According to sites like Wattclarity, the FOR of the coal plants has gone down. Talking to plant engineers there, they haven’t had the money put into maintenance and they are well past their operational life nominal 200k hours but start limited on top of that. They are also forced to load follow. No one will do major refurbishment because the state and federal governments want to get rid of them. Everyone except you acknowledges that.
Tell us who Seb Kennedy is and what his expertise and experience is in running a steel mill powered by intermittent power.
Well, the only other information comes from Rud.
Seems Nick doesn’t have clue who he is, or if he is any more than a low-end journalist.
Seb calls himself a “Freelance energy wordsmith.”
So not even a low-level journalist.
Gullible Nick’s idea of science and facts. !
When will people wake up to the fact that putting CO2 in the atmosphere is a zero sum game with those countries not participating in the reduction the winners? The Marxists want to start a new industrial revolution by destroying the manufacturing base of those countries that benefited from the original one and giving it to their anointed ones.
“It is reckoned that converting Port Talbot to greener electric arc production will cut our CO2 emissions by 1.5 per cent.”.
“the company would receive half finished steel products from overseas, while evaluating whether steel production should continue“.
IOW, the cuts in UK CO2 emissions would at least be matched by CO2 emission increases overseas – until eventually the UK goes to zero and all of the value of all of the undiminished CO2 emissions is handed over to others.
Wales, you have been shafted. But there were never any grounds for expecting anything other than the same pain that has been dished out to the rest of the UK. Liz Truss was your last chance but she was no match for Sir Humphrey’s stooge Rishi Starmer (aka Keir Sunak). The whole of Britain needs a massive change in voting habits at the next general election, to get Brexit started and to have any chance at all of avoiding total destruction.
The problem with Wales from what I saw when I lived there, is anyone with any ability joins the public service, because Westminster and the Welsh Parliament have made such a mess of the economy there are precious few private sector opportunities. But there are plenty of public sector jobs, an alphabet soup of administrative jobs in government bodies, created by politicians to fix the Welsh economy.
This overwhelming desire to meddle is the downfall of modern Britain. There is one place in the British sphere of influence which rejected meddling, and proved it does more harm than good.
Hong Kong’s first postwar finance minister John James Cowperthwaite was so against meddling he even refused to collect detailed statistics, to deny Westminster meddlers the data they needed to mess up the Hong Kong economy. By kicking out the meddlers Cowperthwaite singlehandedly created the Asian Miracle. Pretty soon other Asian countries were following Cowperthwaite’s example, and also kicking out their meddlers.
Subsidy mining 101.
Those bally colonials are onto the game Fontleroy.
What’s a chap to do Fotheringham? AI thin air derivatives? Green crypto?
I thought it rather odd when the picture shows coils of steel sheet when the article had nothing to do with them. Does the Port Talbot facility manufacture these coils of steel sheet?
Almost 40 years ago, I worked as one of the plant electricians at USS/Pohang Iron & Steel in Pittsburg, CA near San Francisco. The steel coils were/are made at the Pohang plant in South Korea then shipped by boat to the facility in Pittsburg for further processing. Those coils are not small as depending on the gauge, can weigh up to 40 tons each.
The picture is a generic steel pic. From the Tata press statement I linked:
I’m not sure from that statement whether rolling occurs in Llanwern and Port Talbot, or whether it all happens at Llanwern.
According to Wikipedia, they have finished steel coils of sheet steel as one of their products
“It is an integrated steelmaking site using imported ore and coal; together with Llanwern steelworks, the plants produce up to 3.5 million tonnes of hot rolled and cold rolled annealed steel coils per annum, for a variety of different end uses.”
“imported ore and coal”…. I understood that there was oodles of coal in Wales, along with oodles of coalminers.. (I know, I know)
Does this graphic need comment?
Holy Moley?
I sure would not want to live on that island, they are nuts! Where is this all going? Scary.
No, the main cause of this is the idiotic decision of the UK to leave the EU. “Brexit” apologists like Neill are desperately attempting to shift the blame away from their own foolishness.
Tata are still operating in other EU countries normally and with no job losses.
When you leave one of the world’s biggest economic markets it affects your ability to export to it. Who would have thought that!?
Honestly. Show me a UK climate science ‘skeptic’ and I’ll show you an idiot who voted for Brexit.
The EU has a major problem with Carbon Leakage. German industry is struggling with high green energy costs.
Leaving the EU was a critical first step to Britain regaining control of their own energy policy, but the quisling “conservatives” in Westminster have so far failed to deliver the benefits.
I mean, to put it into perspective, China, Australia and many other nations do just fine outside the EU. The EU is not the keystone of prosperity, quite the opposite.
My interpretation of what happened could be described as mission creep. People in England, and in Europe generally, were all for a large free trade zone; and what they got was a bloated, unaccountable superstate that trampled their nations’ sovereignty.
Yes, we know you desperately need someone, ANYONE to direct every action in your daily life.
So stupid that you think kowtowing to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels is a sensible idea.
The only idiot here is YOU, fungal… a wastrel suckophant.
SO dumb.
Keep taking the meds.
The EU, UN, CCP, WHO, WEF etc. are all top down collectivist structures and therefore national sovereignty and individual liberty are obstacles to World Government.
The following is displayed on a Plaque at the EU Parliament.
“National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our time and of the steady march of humanity back to tragic disaster and barbarism…The only final remedy for this supreme and catastrophic evil of our time is a federal union of the peoples.. 1939”
Philip Kerr (11th Marquess of Lothian)
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
UN’s Commission on Global Governance
And to counter those misanthropic examples:
“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”
Thomas Sowell
Troll – I sometimes think you make a comment to set a new personal record of downvotes.
To put things in perspective, it seems China produces about half the word’s steel and the UK produced as much as Saudi Arabia, at least in 2020.
https://statisticsanddata.org/data/steel-production-by-country/
I don’t know how much of that is new steel from ore and how much is recycled.
Arc furnaces can be used to produce molten iron from iron ore – it’s called Direct Reduction
But you would then need to put that iron into another arc furnace to make steel
“Arc furnaces can be used to produce molten iron from iron ore – it’s called Direct Reduction”
No. Arc furnaces are used to achieve the high temperatures needed to melt iron, as in steel making. Direct reduction is done without melting, at a lower temperature (800-1200°C). Heat comes from hot reducing gases.
“Port Talbot is the UK’s largest steelworks. It’s owned by an Indian conglomerate…”
Interesting, sort of, that the UK is now becoming a colony of its former colonies.
Back in the prehistoric when I worked at US Steel, they operated their own power plant with LNG fueled generators.
Excess electricity was sold/distributed to the local community.
They were just testing a new electric arc steel process when I left their employ.
Alcoa depended upon government supplied electricity in Australia.
Electric arc furnaces are NOT able to process and Eric your NZ-sourced pic has been doctored. Compare it with this.
gezza
You are the one that is wrong – Glenbrook steel mill (NZs only one) is using arc furnaces to make the iron from ironsand via sponge iron.
https://www.nzsteel.co.nz/new-zealand-steel/the-story-of-steel/the-steel-making-process/iron-making/
And as Nick correctly points out, the sponge iron is not a melting process.