Operations at British Steel were taken over by the UK government over the past weekend following failed negotiations with Chinese owner Jingye over the future of the plant.
“After intensive work over the weekend, the government has secured coke and iron ore pellet for the BFs, and is confident that there will be enough materials to keep the furnaces burning,” the UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said on Tuesday.
At Immingham, a major port on the east coast of England, raw materials shipped from the US have been unloaded and transported to the site “following the government settling payment for them,” the DBT said.
“The materials are enough to keep the blast furnaces running for the coming weeks, with officials continuing to work at pace to get a steady pipeline of materials to keep the fires burning,” it added.
A separate vessel with coking coal was on the way to the UK from Australia, the DBT said, adding that the cargo was “the subject of a legal dispute between British Steel and Jingye over the weekend that has now been resolved” and has been purchased using the existing DBT budget.
“It’s a huge relief that this crucial and overdue shipment of coke arrived at Immingham this morning,” Alasdair McDiarmid, assistant general secretary of trade union Community, said on April 15. “We thank the prime minister and business secretary for their decisive action to secure the raw materials required to keep the blast furnaces [in operation].”
British Steel has installed capacity for 4.3 million tonnes per year of pig iron, and four BFs. It can manufacture a wide range of long steel products, including rails, wire rod, sections and slabs.
Of the four BFs at the site, only two were still operational, but a lack of critical raw materials in stock – iron ore and coking coal – put them on the verge of a complete and potentially very costly shutdown.
If temperatures in the BF were to fall below critical levels, it could disrupt the smelting process, and result in damage to the furnace lining, blockages to inlets and outlets, and difficulties in restarting the furnace. The “cold” furnace would probably need extensive repairs before it could be reheated safely.
EAF future awaits?
Should the two operational BFs be preserved and remain in operation, thoughts will turn to the future of the Scunthorpe plant, which industry sources still expected would make the transition to become a greener and recycling-dependent electric-arc furnace (EAF) operation.
“There is now some demand for lower-emission steel, with some UK construction customers preferring to import EAF steel rather than continuing to use BF steel made in the UK,” a spokesperson for industry body UK Steel told Fastmarkets on Monday.
“Our energy costs are [among the] dearest in the world, so we will never be competitive in steel,” a major UK scrap processor said on Tuesday.
British Steel’s product mix was not sufficiently specialized to shield it from global competition, the same source said. He pointed out that Indian steelmakers can easily make large volumes of rail with lower costs for “compliance”, health and safety, and energy than in the UK.
Energy costs were also making the processing of scrap very expensive in the UK, he said, but added that British Steel moving to an EAF model would be a boon for scrap demand in northern England at a time when minimal volumes were being sold into the local market, with most UK scrap bought by export docks.
In March 2025, Jingye turned down £500 million ($661 million) in financial support, offered by the UK government, intended to support British Steel’s transition to green steel production by moving production toward the use of EAFs.
Wales-based Tata Steel accepted a similar £500 million offer in public funding from the UK government to develop a greener EAF-based steelmaking plant at Port Talbot in September 2024, with the company pledging to invest an additional £750 million.
The UK produced just 4 million tonnes of steel in 2024, down by 29% year on year from 5.6 million tonnes in 2023, ranking the country’s economy just 35th in the world as a steel producer, according to the World Steel Association.
At the same time, the UK imported 6.45 million tonnes of iron and steel products over the year, according to UK customs data cited by Global Trade Tracker.
