Q What is the Tatas doing to reduce its carbon footprint?

A At Tata Steel we have multiple initiatives in place. First and foremost is to make sure that our sites are benchmarks in the industry for their carbon efficiency in the processes they use. Our Ijmuiden site in the Netherlands is one of the most carbon-efficient integrated steelmaking sites in the world. Our Jamshedpur site is the most carbon efficient integrated steelmaking site in India. Despite this, we are working on further improvements over the next few years, not only in these sites but also in the other three, main steelmaking sites with us.

We are investing in new processes and the Hisarna process, which is at the pilot scale in Ijmuiden, will be scaled up in India and the Netherlands over the next few years. This will not only help us make better use of inferior quality raw material but also be more carbon-efficient than the blast furnaces and generate cleaner CO2 that is more amenable for storage and usage. We are also doing a lot of work on carbon storage in the Netherlands.

In SE Asia, we produce most of the steel through the more carbon-efficient recycling route and a prerequisite for that is a good steel recycling ecosystem. We have started work in this area in India and have set up India’s first high-quality steel recycling facility in Rohtak, Haryana. Our steel recycling business will be the precursor to us producing steel in India through the recycling route.

We are also collaborating with companies like Shell and others across other industries to do joint projects and share learnings to reduce our carbon footprint. We also factor in a carbon cost when we evaluate projects and that helps us take the right capital allocation decisions.

We have been recognised for our efforts by the World Steel Association multiple times in the last few years and are ranked quite high in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
 
Q Can Port Talbot be made competitive? If others are confident, why not Tatas?

A The Port Talbot site has some inherent disadvantages. They are short on coke and often have to buy coke. They don’t have a pellet plant and so have to buy pellets. They are short on power and so have to buy power from the grid. The cost of power in the UK is almost two times the cost of power in some other European countries. In view of the above disadvantages, there is a fair amount of investment required to make the site structurally viable. This is despite Tata Steel making significant investments at the site over the last decade to reline the blast furnaces and augment other facilities. We had two other major sites in the UK which we had divested over the last decade and those who bought it from us were not able to run it as long as we did.

These are challenging sites and while operationally the teams are doing a great job, the structural challenges will require a lot of heavy lifting. While we have demonstrated great commitment over the last 13 years, we now need support and have reached out to the government for the same, to take it further.