British Steel bill to save Scunthorpe

Originally Posted by Paul

As a fuel to make the steel, maybe.
However, you also need carbon to create the steel itself.
That carbon also (normally) comes from the coke.
As best I can tell, its not impossible to use other sources of carbon, but none are as common.

Of course, "Net Zero" is a far off (and currently unrealisitc) fantasy anyway.

In virgin steel production at Scunthorpe the coke provides some of the heat as well as the source of carbon. They also seem to use some unmodified coal in the process.

Virgin steel production without coke is possible, apparently they do it in Iran and India, and there are newer methods which aren’t commercialised yet, but any of these would require the steelworks to be rebuilt.

So we now have emergency ship-loads of coking coal and iron ore heading to the UK from the USA and Australia, with some apparently likely to come from Japan as well, and no doubt we paid top-tier prices for it to make sure it doesn’t get diverted anywhere else en route.

I wonder whether Friends of the Earth still think they scored a win by preventing it being mined in Cumbria and delivered to Scunthorpe by train, a mere 300 miles away?

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Chris

So we now have emergency ship-loads of coking coal and iron ore heading to the UK from the USA and Australia, with some apparently likely to come from Japan as well, and no doubt we paid top-tier prices for it to make sure it doesn’t get diverted anywhere else en route.

I wonder whether Friends of the Earth still think they scored a win by preventing it being mined in Cumbria and delivered to Scunthorpe by train, a mere 300 miles away?

This is the fallacy of net-zero.

Like, saying Drax is renewable by switching the fuel from coal to "bio-mass" wood pellets, shipped across the Atlantic from Canada (using renewable diesel no doubt) and then by train from Liverpool (again using that renewable diesel)

Virtue signalling at a billion dollar scale.