Greener Steel at Britain’s Largest Plant Comes With Heavy Job Losses

The British government and the Indian conglomerate Tata said on Wednesday that they would jointly invest 1.25 billion pounds, or about $1.6 billion, in the country’s largest steel mill, in Port Talbot, Wales, to make operations there less polluting.

As part of the overhaul, about 2,800 of the company’s 8,000 steel jobs in Britain will be lost over time, a spokesman for Tata said, in part because the electric technology will require fewer workers.

Still, the plan was, from the point of view of employees, an improvement on a proposal announced last year when Britain’s Conservative government was in power. Both deals include the same £500 million in government support, but workers facing layoffs will now be offered the option for paid retraining for other occupations.

The government says this project will cut overall emissions in Britain 1.5 percent by shifting steel production to a process of melting down scrap metal — an operation that depends on the availability of this raw material and, some critics say, cannot be used for producing the highest-quality grades of steel.

It has not been easy to preserve Britain’s steel-making industry, which has been in decline for decades. The governing Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is promoting clean energy investment as a pillar of its strategy for reviving a stagnant economy. It has argued that it is important to maintain the country’s ability to produce steel and said it would allocate £2.5 billion in additional funding “to rebuild the industry and help it decarbonize.”

“Port Talbot has always and will always be a steel-making town,” said Jonathan Reynolds, Britain’s business and trade secretary.

But the agreement announced on Wednesday fell short of the hopes of the unions, which had sought to preserve jobs by keeping part of the plant operating during the transition. “This deal is not something to celebrate,” the Community Trade Union, which represents workers at the plant, said in a statement.

Tata, which acquired the Port Talbot plant and other European operations in 2007, has grown determined to stem its losses in Britain. The company closed one of the two blast furnaces this summer, and it was gradually winding down operations in Port Talbot, making it increasingly difficult for the plant to continue functioning in its traditional form.

The company has pledged to continue steel production at Port Talbot, but work will be reduced for a substantial period while Tata replaces the existing blast furnaces and other units, which make steel using coal, with electric versions that are less polluting. The new electric unit, though, will not be operating for at least three years.

“This complex and ambitious transformation of Port Talbot has the potential to make the plant one of Europe’s premier centers for green steel-making,” Tata Steel’s chief executive, T.V. Narendran, said in a news release on Wednesday.