26 Sep 2024
Long goodbye to blast furnace no. 4 is almost over, as Port Talbot stands on the precipice of becoming a ‘steel town’ unable to produce its own ‘virgin’ steel. It was a huge moment.
The long goodbye to blast furnace no. 4 is almost over, as Port Talbot stands on the precipice of becoming a ‘steel town’ unable to produce its own ‘virgin’ steel. It was a huge moment. The sense of imminent – and irreversible – change everywhere, not least in the vastness of the Tata Steel control room where they stand ready for this final trigger, the seismic shutdown.
“I started the day after my 16th birthday and I’ve been in the furnace making iron since,” Wade Christensen said. Now 53, he will be part of a team that will oversee the 16-hour process of slowly starving the furnace of all the coke and iron ore — the core ingredients needed to make molten iron (and then steel).
“It’s two and a half thousand degrees now,” he pointed to several cameras looking inside the furnace. With unknown pride, he summarizes the process that once earned this city the nickname ‘The City of Steel’ – and which makes all his life work.
His voice broke, for a moment, when he added: “Personally, I’ve been with the company for a long time. Three shifts left and it’s over… after all these years. I can’t help but feel sad. This is just the end of a long career, a career that’s good, but it’s over now, and it’s emotional.
The argument for keeping Port Talbot’s last colossal blast furnace open has long since been exhausted, now being drowned out by the chorus of politics. Indian owner TATA Steel instead sees a future for Port Talbot based on a different technology: recycling steel from scrap metal in an electric arc furnace. But, at least, it’s been operational for four years.
The Port Talbot hot and cold strip factory will remain intact, but will be rolling steel slabs imported from overseas, instead of being made on site. The end of blast furnace operations also marked the closure of coke ovens and sinter plants – the ‘heavy end’ of steelmaking. The port, which has long been a gateway for iron ore imports, is no longer active.
A greener steelmaking future is on the horizon. The closure of blast furnaces could see all UK carbon emissions reduced by around 1.5 per cent. But it has cost 1,900 jobs at the Port Talbot site itself (half the workforce) and, according to the local council, at least 5,000 more in the wider supply chain. Amid global aspirations to ‘just transition’ to a low carbon economy that is fair and equitable for all, this is perhaps the case of the deepest fault line.
This part of south Wales still bears the scars of previous deindustrialisation. Once again, Neath Port Talbot Council is prepared to deal with a growing social need due to unforeseen circumstances. “The effect that TATA (closing the blast furnace) will have on the local economy is huge,” says Simon Knoyle, member of the cabinet for finance (whose wife is employed in steelworks). With the council already warning of a £23m black hole in next year’s budget, he fears the additional financial challenges that large-scale job losses could pose: “We’re not getting enough money to provide the services (support) we need.”
The UK government has since released some £100m ‘Tata Steel/Port Talbot Transition Board funds’ to support businesses and workers affected by the changes. However, the longer-term challenge is how to replace the many well-paid jobs in areas with pockets of high deprivation, in the middle of which is a city synonymous with a single commodity, steel. Talk of Celtic Freeport’s future ushering in a new era of floating offshore wind ventures for the region looks better than expected, at this stage.
Everyone in Port Talbot, it seems, has a connection with steel. In the city centre, on Station Road, Teagen Davies, a 23-year-old mother, wonders if her partner, a contractor with TATA, will be left out of work. Ray Coombes, now in his seventies, recalls more than 36 years in the steel mill, mostly working in blast furnaces and coke ovens: “There was a friend of mine who worked with me who was sitting on a mountain when we had five furnaces in this town, and he painted five…1,2 and 3 were pulled down last year.Now number 4 and 5 will be gone.
At the entrance of the green explosion building 4, there is a sign in blue letters stating ‘Premier League Iron Making’. Inside, on the casting floor, a stream of molten iron almost like a volcanic pour from the bottom of the furnace, bathing all the spectators in a rich, amber glow. They remove the waste (or ‘slag’) before funneling it into the ‘torpedo’, soon to be ferried to the factory where it is finally processed into steel. A digital readout on the wall records a production rate of 180 tons of molten iron per hour. A steelworker is seen, perhaps in the last change here, next to a mug with the inscription: “Grandma, the one to see.”
They have been smelting iron and making steel in Port Talbot for over a century. In the boom years of the 1950s, when Europe’s largest and most modern urban steel mill, Port Talbot was considered the single greatest success story of the post-war Welsh economy. The Wales Steel Company at the time called Port Talbot ‘the city of Steel’, boasting: ‘Day and night, this town is at work. Their only concern is simple: to make steel.’
When Christian Wade and his colleagues in the control room were given the signal, Port Talbot’s era of making ‘virgin’ steel was coming to an end.
