Coal delivery arrives to keep Scunthorpe steel plant working for months

Steelmaking at Scunthorpe will continue for months, the government has said, after it confirmed that a shipment of more than 55,000 tonnes of coking coal arrived in the UK this weekend.

The shipment – more than four times the weight of the Shard, western Europe’s tallest building – landed at the Immingham bulk terminal on the Humber River on Sunday and will be taken by rail the 20 miles to the British Steel site to power its blast furnaces.

It arrived just over a fortnight after ministers recalled parliament to approve emergency legislation to take control of the site and continue production amid fears that British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, planned to let the furnaces run cold.

The takeover prompted a frantic scramble at the highest level of government to secure new shipments of raw materials to feed the plant’s two furnaces, nicknamed Queen Anne and Queen Bess.

The blast furnace coke that arrived on Sunday was imported from Bluescope Steel’s plant in Australia. Another shipment of more than 66,000 tonnes of iron ore pellets and 27,000 tonnes of iron ore fines, a lower-grade source of iron, is due to arrive from Sweden next week.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said: “By securing the raw materials we need to keep Scunthorpe going for the foreseeable future we’ve helped protect thousands of crucial steel jobs. Now British Steel workers and their families can breathe a sigh of relief and know that we are on their side.”

The government said the shipments had been paid for from existing budgets at the Department for Business and Trade.

Earlier this week, British Steel scrapped a consultation plan on making up to 2,700 steelworkers redundant that Jingye had launched after it proposed closing Scunthorpe’s two blast furnaces, which would have ended the UK’s ability to make steel from scratch.

Allan Bell, interim chief executive at British Steel, said: “We’ve successfully secured the raw materials we need to keep the blast furnaces running, meaning our production of steel can continue. Over the coming months our focus will be on stabilising our operations for the long term, cementing British Steel as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of steel.”

Securing the supply of coking coal to the Scunthorpe plant has avoided the need for a so-called “salamander tap”, a process in which a hole is drilled in the bottom of the blast furnace to let out, or tap, molten metal and slag, which in effect would have paused steelmaking operations at one of the two furnaces.

Alasdair McDiarmid, an assistant general secretary at the steelworkers’ union Community, said: “We are grateful to British Steel and the government for the decisive work they have undertaken to secure a future for the business. After years of neglect, we now have a UK government which understands the vital strategic importance of steel and is backing this up with action.”

The government said that now the urgent supplies of raw materials had been obtained it was continuing to focus on securing British Steel’s long-term future by finding private-sector funding.