Gwythian Prins: National security concerns must take precedence over the climate

There is a respectable peacetime economic case for closing the Port Talbot blast furnaces and ceasing production of basic oxygen steel (BOS) in the United Kingdom and it is set out by the leading trade economist Catherine McBride. She shows how much British steel-making of any type has declined by volume, and how chronically dependant what remains is upon imported raw materials. She also explains how much EAF – electric arc furnace – steel production from recycled scrap has increased worldwide: for example, 70% of American steel in 2022 came from that source. Finally, she shows how globally dominant China and India have become in BOS, as witness 90% of China’s 1 billion ton steel production in 2022. China and India have massive economies of scale, and also access to domestically controlled raw materials, giving end-to-end control: in the Chinese case, both coking coal and iron ore, and in the Indian case, iron ore but with need to import coking coal. In contrast, the UK currently has to import both ore and coking coal at scale to feed the condemned blast furnaces.

While neither of the Asian giants exports much primary steel – in the Chinese case, only 40 million of 1 billion tons produced – both are major suppliers of steel products. The UK buys more steel products from China than from anywhere else, and therein begin the problems. ‘While the UK doesn’t matter to China, China matters to us,’ McBride observes sharply.

There is an unrespectable case for closing the Port Talbot blast furnaces and replacing them with Electric Arc Furnaces. It is the one which the government supports and, with a half billion pound bung, proposes to pay Tata Steel to effect: you can be sure that they wouldn’t do it otherwise. This is the claim of some contribution on the fantasy road to ‘Net Zero’ where the harder you try the more you fail.

However, in two major reports, the iron and steel trades unions have blown that alleged ‘Net Zero’ gain out of the water, pointing to the obvious: BOS steel not produced in Port Talbot will be produced elsewhere and imported to this country. So there is zero reduction to global carbon dioxide emissions and there is the addition of emissions from ocean transport. Without pig iron, there is also loss of full-spectrum virgin steels capability, loss of high quality jobs and the social devastation of lives in South Wales. The unions’ plan is on the right side of history and should simply go further: ignore the ‘Net Zero’ targets and focus, on national security grounds, on securing a domestic balance of BOS and EAF production. France and Germany both have a 70/30 split, for example. The unions plainly understand the industry better than any civil servant or think tank genuflecting to Net Zero targets.

Therefore, this is the moment when the music stops. The Port Talbot closure harshly exposes the costs of luxury ‘green’ beliefs as we enter the second phase of a global war. It is a war of different theatres and modes of conflict: simultaneously ‘hot’ (kinetic) in Ukraine, the Middle East and with Taiwan threatened; ‘cold’ (economic) with China, Russia and Iran; and ‘grey’ (psychological, cyber and subversive), with all the enemies of the Free World. Major recent statements by NATO’s Military Committee chairman, the Head of the Army (and Norwegian and Swedish CDSs) and the Defence Secretary finally inform the public of these inconvenient facts. This is no drill.

These concerns touch upon the question of Port Talbot directly and add to the many powerful objections to the closure decision. It must be reversed – we cannot be dependent on imports for the full range of necessary steels to rebuild our arsenals – the Navy first and foremost – and most ridiculously, we cannot be dependent for them on our global antagonists. China’s coal-fired economy is why it can readily build its new navy, just as we once did and must again.

Catherine McBride’s primary argument for replacing BOS steelmaking with EAF is concern about reliance on imported strategic raw materials. However she also observes that UK electricity costs are among the most expensive in the world and this destroys the case for EAFs as well, or for any unsubsidised steel production in the UK at all. EAFs require abundant and stable electricity supplies, such as they have in the USA. And the cause of the UK’s crippling electricity price? Net Zero. So the issue is not BOS versus EAF steel: it’s Net Zero’s all pervasive toxicity, poisoning UK power generation. 

In our ‘pre-war’ world, what must change? First secure the grid. With news of delays to Qatari LNG shipments, upon whose regular arrival at Milford Haven we depend, UK grid security and stability are left dangling precariously on two threads: interconnector imports and undersea gas pipelines, which the Russian Navy’s Special Submarine Operations force (GUGI) could easily interdict. All offshore infrastructure with supply pipes and wires are similarly vulnerable, of course.  However, gas is dangerously central to our energy security, given that uncontrollable wind and solar simply destabilise the grid – beware the Dunkelflaute my beamish boy! Therefore grid security has to be assured, mainly by the only large remaining firm power source, combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power stations. The UK’s main gas storage site at Rough, which re-opened in 2022, has been doubled in capacity to 54 billion cubic feet of gas in 2023; but the obvious step of permitting Bowland Shale fracking remains blocked.

Therefore, by elimination, there is only one broad highway to safety. It is to follow Germany, erstwhile home of deep green eco-politics, which, in a hard-headed way after the disaster of the Energiewende, is moving back to coal – yes coal – but not coal as you think you know it. Advanced ultra super-critical technology (AUSC) is clean coal that achieves close to 50% thermal efficiency.

In tandem, we must also fix our import vulnerabilities in coal and iron ore. Take a deep breath as that reality hits home.

For the UK, this means re-opening South Wales premium hard coal and Nottingham deep mines, because we need domestic supplies both to power the grid cheaply and reliably once more – no form of nuclear will be made ready quickly enough, while GE’s AUSC plants are available today. (We will also need Cumbrian metallurgical coal to supply Port Talbot, so we can still have the full range of virgin steels.)

CCGTs can then be retired from base load, and take on a supporting role as peaking power, as such a high-quality fuel should be used. We shall need to re-engage the wartime mentality of strategic stockpiling; and thank goodness that Sweden, currently on the threshold of entering NATO, will be on our side this time in terms of iron ore exports, unlike during the Second World War.

Recognising the strategic risk in renewables’ fragility leads to the inevitable conclusion that subsidy plugs and bungs – like the one given to Tata essentially to compensate for electricity costs driven uneconomically high by Net Zero, so it will build EAF at all – must be pulled.

‘And what of our CO2 targets?’, many outraged voices may wail. ‘What of Net Zero?’, the subject which is on every lip but which few understand? The music stops there too. Now that we can explain why the Hansen 1988 ‘control knob’ CO2/global temperature close-coupling hypothesis doesn’t hold, which is the major finding of thirty five years of global climate systems research, but instead is vitiated by two fundamental errors in its theory of knowledge and by a major technical error by the IPCC (see Archimedes’ Fulcrum pp. 9-13), we can more accurately assess the risks from anthropogenic CO2 emissions to global security, relative to other risks, and adapt to them. As ‘wicked’ problems, they cannot be mitigated because there is no sufficient understanding of cause and effect. Outside the closed belief-systems of eco-zealotry, in the real hard world of geopolitics, anthropogenic CO2 risks rank pretty low and, for our adversaries, not at all. They weaponise our ‘green’ thinking against us.

The reversal of the Port Talbot blast furnace closure on national security grounds, a return to domestic coal for power and for steel, pulling the subsidies plug on renewables-that-are-not, and jettisoning of Net Zero targets – so glibly conjured into being on the back of shoddy data, and unthinkingly nodded into law to give Mrs May a semblance of a ‘legacy’ – will be the signal that reason and clear-thinking have returned. We shall once again have economics as if the defence of the Realm, the wealth and health of its citizens, and indeed the health of the environment too – which is no paradox – really mattered. That true environmental visionary E.F. Schumacher was never apologetic about his career with the National Coal Board. No more should we be about clean coal now, as the noises of eco-zealotry in the isle subside and we awaken as if from a dream.

As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.

Gwythian Prins

The author is Research Professor Emeritus at the LSE, where he directed the Mackinder Programme, 2002–13. He was convenor of the Hartwell Group on Climate Change and Energy 2007–19, and has served as adviser to both the Japanese and (former) Czechoslovak governments on energy and environment issues. Before that he was the first security consultant to the Hadley Centre for Climate Predication and Research at the Meteorological Office, loaned by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency of the MoD (1999–2001). Afterwards, he was a member of the Chiefs of the Defence Staff’s Strategy Advisory Panel. During his early career, he was a fellow in history at Emmanuel College and university lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge