GFG Alliance (www.gfgalliance.com), one of the UK’s largest industrial groups, has announced plans to create five million tonnes of low-carbon steel-making capacity over the next five years — a quantity equivalent to half of all the steel currently made in the UK in a year — as part of a drive to develop a “green and competitive future” for manufacturing in the UK.

The company, which includes Liberty House and SIMEC Energy, said the plan would play an important role in delivering the vision for ‘clean growth’ outlined in the Government’s Industrial Strategy White Paper.

GFG Alliance, which already employs 5,500 people at its Liberty House UK steel and engineering plants, says that as part of its Green Steel strategy, it aims to recycle ‘at home’ a large proportion of the 7.2 million tonnes of scrap steel currently exported from the UK each year; this should ‘displace’ much of the 6.6 million tonnes of raw steel currently imported each year.

The UK exports more of its scrap for processing abroad than any other developed economy, and GFG says this abundant raw material provides a huge opportunity to drive clean growth by making low-carbon steel ‘at home’.

Jay Hambro, chief investment officer at the GFG Alliance, said: “The Government’s White Paper acknowledges that ‘green energy’ and industrial competitiveness go hand in hand, and we welcome the document’s emphasis on clean growth.

“That link between energy and industry has been at the heart of our own Green Steel strategy, and we are greatly encouraged to see public policy going strongly in this direction.

Green Steel made using renewable energy has only one tenth of the carbon footprint of blast-furnace production and should form a key part of the clean-growth focus.”