05/02/2023
Government to offer £600m for green steel switch
The government is expected to announce hundreds of millions of pounds of support to help Britain's two biggest steelmakers go green.
The funding for British Steel and Tata Steel UK is likely to be unveiled by the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, this week.
Each is expected to receive around £300m of grants to help pay for a switch away from coal-fired blast furnaces and help with energy costs.
It will also protect thousands of jobs in Britain's industrial heartlands.
Central to the offer of support are the companies' blast furnaces. These use vast quantities of coking coal, a treated form of coal, to smelt iron from ore-bearing rock. As a result they produce huge amounts of carbon dioxide, which drives global warming.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy told the BBC it was working closely with the steel industry to secure what it describes as "a sustainable and competitive future". Sources told the BBC last week that a £300m funding package was being considered for British Steel.
This follows a request by British Steel, which is owned by Chinese company Jingye, for hundreds of millions of pounds of grants to prevent the closure of its blast furnace at Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.
