Liberty Steel hosts UK officials at EAF facility

United Kingdom-based Liberty Steel UK, part of the larger GFG Alliance conglomerate, hosted two U.K. Labour Party Members of Parliament (MPs) at its steel rebar production plant in Rotherham, England.

In early October, Ed Miliband, who is the Labour Party’s Shadow Business Secretary, and John Healey, the party’s Shadow Defence Secretary, received a tour of what Liberty calls its  Greensteel process using an electric arc furnace (EAF) to make steel rebar Liberty calls “Grebar.”

“Liberty’s new Greensteel Grebar product can be instrumental in infrastructure projects such as HS2 (a rail sector project) that will enable the U.K. to ‘build back better’ from the pandemic,” says Jon Ferriman, managing director Liberty Steel UK.

Miliband says, “We owe it to people to both save businesses and jobs in this crisis and build back better after it. This must mean putting U.K. manufacturers and their workers at the heart of the country’s recovery from the pandemic, including with jobs in the green economy. Steel can be at the heart of a green future for our county. But to make this happen we need an industrial strategy which helps our manufacturers, including with procurement contracts that take account of environmental standards and support jobs in areas that need them.”

Liberty describes itself as a recent entrant into the U.K. rebar market, saying it can help reduce the nation’s reliance on imports, which currently meet half of the country’s 500 million pounds  ($647 million) annual demand for rebar.

According to a mid-June news release from Liberty Steel, the company’s second EAF in Rotherham came online in 2018, upping its melt capacity there to 500,000 metric tons per year. At that time, Liberty announced it intends to “further boost production at Rotherham to over 1 million metric tons annually through investments to expand its product mix and making more productive use of its rolling mills to target attractive market segments.”

The company also said at that time it intended to tap into the “surplus of scrap metal recovered in the U.K., which can be recycled into new steel products through EAFs.”