Port Talbot braces for closure of historic blast furnace

The long goodbye to blast furnace no. 4 is nearly over, as Port Talbot stands on the precipice of becoming a ‘steel town’ stripped of its ability to make its own ‘virgin’ steel. It is a huge moment. The sense of imminent – and irreversible – change is everywhere, not least in the wide expanse of the Tata Steel control room where they stand ready to trigger this final, seismic shutdown.

“I started the day after my 16th birthday and I’ve been on the furnaces making iron ever since,” Wade Christensen says. Now 53 years old, he will be part of the team which will oversee a 16-hour process of gradually starving the furnace of all its coke and iron ore – the core materials needed to make molten iron (and then steel).

“That’s two and a half thousand degrees right now,” he points to an array of cameras peering into the searing depths of the furnace. With undisguised pride, he summarises the process which once earned this town the epithet ‘City of Steel’ – and which has underpinned his whole working life.

His voice breaks, briefly, as he adds: “Personally, I’ve been in the company a long time. Three shifts left and that’s it done… after all these years. I can’t help but be sad myself. It’s just the end of a long career, a good career, but it’s coming to an end now, and it’s emotional.”

The arguments to keep open the last of Port Talbot’s colossal blast furnaces have long been exhausted, subsumed now by a chorus of political recriminations. TATA Steel’s Indian owners instead look to a future for Port Talbot based around a different technology: recycling steel out of scrap metal in an electric arc furnace. But, at a minimum, it is four years away from being operational.

Port Talbot’s hot and cold strip mills will remain intact, but they’ll be rolling steel slab imported from overseas, rather than made on site. The end of blast furnace operations signals also the closure of the coke ovens and sinter plant – the ‘heavy end’ of its steelmaking. The harbour, for so long its gateway to iron ore imports, already stands idle.

A vastly greener steelmaking future is on the horizon. The blast furnace closure could see the UK’s entire carbon emissions reduced by around 1.5 per cent. But it comes at a cost of 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 for ‘just transitions’ to low-carbon economies that are fair and equitable for everyone, arguably this is a case of deep fault lines being exposed.

This part of south Wales still bears the scars of previous eras of deindustrialisation. Once again Neath Port Talbot Council is preparing to face vast social needs in the inevitable fallout. “The effect that TATA [closing the blast furnace] is going to have on the local economy is huge,” says Simon Knoyle, the council’s cabinet member for finance (whose wife is employed at the steelworks). With the council already warning of a £23m black hole in next year’s budget, he fears the additional financial challenges such wide scale job losses may bring: “We’re not getting enough money to provide the [support] services that we need to.”

The UK government has started to release some of its £100m ‘Tata Steel/Port Talbot Transition Board fund’ to support businesses and workers affected by the changes. The longer-term challenge, however, will be how to replace so many well-paid jobs in an area with pockets of high deprivation, at the heart of which lies a town synonymous with a single commodity, steel. Talk of the future Celtic Freeport ushering in a new era of floating off-shore wind ventures for this area appears laced more with hope than expectation, at this stage.

Everyone in Port Talbot, seemingly, has a connection with the steelworks. In the town centre, on Station Road, Teagen Davies, a 23 year old mother of two, wonders whether her partner, a contractor with TATA, will be left with a job. Ray Coombes, now in his seventies, reminisces over 36 years at the steelworks, mostly working the blast furnaces and coke ovens: “There was a friend of mine working with me who sat on the mountain when we had five furnaces in this town, and he painted the five…1,2 and 3 they pulled down years ago. Now 4 and 5 will be gone…it’s heartbreaking.”

At the entrance to the towering, blackened edifice of blast furnace 4, a sign in blue lettering proclaims ‘Premier League Iron Making’. Inside, on the casting floor, an almost volcanic-like stream of molten iron pours from the base of the furnace, bathing all onlookers in a rich, amber glow. They remove the waste (or ‘slag’) before funnelling it into a ‘torpedo’, soon to be ferried to the plant where it’s finally processed into steel. A digital readout on the wall records a production rate of 180 tonnes of liquid iron per hour. A steelworker looks on, perhaps on his last ever shift here, next to a mug inscribed with the words: “Grandad, someone to always look up to.”

They have been melting iron and making steel in Port Talbot for more than a century. In the boom years of the 1950s, when the town’s steelworks were the largest and most modern in Europe, Port Talbot was considered the greatest single success story of the post-war Welsh economy. The Steel Company of Wales at the time hailed Port Talbot ‘the city of Steel’, boasting: ‘Day and night, this city is at work. Its one concern is simple: to make steel.’

When Christian Wade and his colleagues in the control room are given the signal, the era of Port Talbot making ‘virgin’ steel will end.