As recounted here before, in every energy co I worked for I always took every sensible opportunity to visit the plant - and make my staff do the same. In an intrinsically physical business, a decent first-hand understanding of the hardware, the people that operate it, and the issues they must deal with, is IMHO damn' important for every one of a multitude of reasons. (That includes getting the most and the best out of those folks on a sustained and sustainable basis, BTW.)
With that as one's attitude, one quickly gets to share the disdain of the folks at the plant for those who treat the industrial nitty-gritty as something rather alien that happens somewhere, who-knows-quite-where, but in any case a long way from London & the Home Counties. Is "Teeside" on the River Tee, perhaps? It is in this spirit that over the past few days I have caught two different broadcasters offering the following couple of gems:
"Scunthorpe get its raw materials** from somewhere called Immingham ..."
"... the port of Immingham, in the North East of England"
That would be, errr, the second largest port by tonnage in the UK - wherever this obscure place might actually be. Finally and at last, today I heard "... from Immingham, 20 miles to the East". A simple and correct relativistic formulation which absolves them from knowing where either town actually is.
Of course it's also somewhat rich to hear Greens and progressives of the non-labourist ilk eulogising belatedly over retaining a domestic, coal-fuelled virgin steel manufacturing capability, for building all that wonderful Net Zero kit, new houses etc etc, doncha know? Well yes, here at C@W and its BTL friends, we always did know. Pig-ignorant metro-gits.
ND
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** I swear the whole weekend went past without that convenient blanket euphemism "raw materials" being explicated as dirty old iron ore and COAL
17 comments:
Must say I'd never considered Lincolnshire to be the North East!
Though coke ovens were shut don in Feb? Understood part of blast furnace problems was poor quality Chinese coke . How will coal be processed before feeding to Blast Furnace??
A government adminstrator will have a smattering of Aristotle, a thick leavening of political nous and a desire to endure Scunthorpe for as little as possible before getting back to Haslemere.
Looking after steel say will not last forever, an eye has to be kept on the next move, the CV and the certain knowledge that you would not have been lumbered with an energy problem if the energy people had been able to fix it - you certainly won't. The energy people's problem was probably the surrounding admin and politics and they are you.
In the end it would probably be cheaper to bung the Chinese an extra £Bn or so and let them run it properly. Or hand over to the French or Germans. Aristotle would probably advise doing one thing well rather than incompatible things badly.
We Haslemerians don't want government administrators here - they lower the tone of the place. You either have to be "something in the city" or Joan Armatrading.
Soon Scunthorpe will revert to being that town whose name couldn't be used on the internet in the early days of automatic censorship for lewd language.
I have long since ceased to be amazed by the sheer, monumental ignorance of most supposedly “top management” about how — as a practical matter of engineering, materials and the built environment — the world around them works.
Even the mundane, familiar things surrounding them are not only a complete mystery (which is fair enough, no-one is born with knowledge and if you’ve not been taught, you can’t know) but there is an almost wilful lack of curiosity.
How is the office space you’re sitting in heated and cooled? How are the electrical sockets wired and where are they wired to? What is the ceiling made of? How do the lifts work? What brings outside air in when you can’t open the windows? Who changes a light bulb in the entrance atrium and how do they do that when it is 15m high?
They could barely answer a couple of these at best and you were never, ever, thanked for asking, when circumstances caused you to have to point something like one of these out. I vividly recall having to explain to one especially clueless bigwig why they couldn’t bring in an (usually heavy for an office environment) piece of equipment and locate it where they wanted. The building had a suspended floor. I attempted to explain the subject but it wasn’t just the details which were beyond, apparently, their comprehension but the basic concept was beyond what they could even imagine. I had to pull up a floor time to show that what they were utterly convinced was like solid ground was, in reality, mostly fresh air.
Funny old world. When I trained as an metallurgist at De Beers( in Africa a process engineer is a metallurgist) I had to work in and then run every section of the diamond recovery plant and then run the whole thing as a shift foreman until deemed competent. The whole process took about a year but I could still walk round a plant now and tell you what is going on. The only thing that has changed massively is computer control and automation, the kit is pretty much the same. This stood in good stead in a 30 year involvment with diamonds. I probably know more about steel production than anyone in parliament come to think of it, Leeds University used to produce good engineers. I cannot stand arts graduates who think their education enables them to understand the real world….great blog. Charles
* edit: floor tile<\i>.
OT, but a sensible Supreme Court decision. Wonders will never cease.
In my student dorm at Leeds Uni (late 80s, early 90s) there was a coal miner from South Yorkshire who was sponsored on his mining engineering course by British Coal.
The NCB took most of the miners and a lot of the mineral engineers. We had a couple sponsored by the Zambian govt who were destined for the copper belt and a Namibian, sponsored by De Beers, who I subsequently worked with when we ended up on the same mine. He went on to become a big fish in Namibia. Interesting place Leeds. Everyone else normally passed through South Africa as it had a massive mining and minerals industry and a shortage of engineers, that was my route to Namibia actually. Charles
OT but relevant
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2025/apr/15/steel-was-a-security-risk-what-about-uk-gas-storage
Government was not prepared to see British Steel turn off its furnaces, deeming them to be a critical asset for national security. So what is its security view on the UK’s capacity to store gas? In a time of trade wars, disrupted supply chains and suspected Russian sabotage in the Baltic Sea, are ministers happy for the country to go into next winter with only half the volume of stored gas of recent years? The question was raised here a couple of months ago and is becoming urgent because Centrica, the owner of the Rough facility off the coast of Yorkshire that makes up half the UK’s gas storage capacity, this week quietly stopped refilling the site. The company cannot see a way to make a profit.
Never mind gas storage, what about local production of oil & gas? The moronic politicians from Blue, Red, Yellow and Green factions of the continuity WEF party have seen to the demise of the North Sea basin.
All of these gas storage scare stores are basically just attempts by Centrica to get their hands on some more government welfare cheques.
Between domestic production, Norway (with multiple points of entry to the UK via BEACH pipelines, LNG import terminal capacity (and LNG storage) plus a minimum 10 (usually 20) day existing storage capacity there is little sane justification for huge storage capacity increase.
"Would that be enough if, say, LNG flows from the US become entangled in Trump’s trade war? Or if a boycott of Russian gas were to be fully enforced in European markets? And the nightmarish scenario, say defence and energy experts, would be interruption in the dead of winter to the Langeled pipeline from Norway, possibly the most critical piece in the UK’s energy network. Just-in-time deliveries are great until they don’t arrive, or you have to pay over-the-top prices."
We had a lot of this in COVID. A group took it upon themselves to proclaim that they wanted (or needed) this- or that- measure to be implemented or some other policy response to be 1) imposed on society at large and b) often at a cost borne by the public purse.
Often these asks were only loosely based on a reasonable worse-case scenario and all-too-frequently justified only be some thought-experiment where multiple bad events somehow coincided. Yet, some still insisted because “I want to feel safe!”.
Eventually, especially as the societal and financial cost mounted of all this risk mitigation they were told, basically, to bugger off.
Shale gas ????
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