A Norwegian green-steel start-up has emerged as the preferred bidder for the former Liberty Steel operations in South Yorkshire, raising hopes of a long-awaited rescue for two plants that have become emblematic of Britain’s troubled heavy industry.
Blastr, a business backed by the Oslo-based renewables investor Vanir Green Industries, has entered a five-week period of exclusive negotiations with the Government’s official receiver to acquire Speciality Steel UK (SSUK), the company that owns Britain’s largest operating electric arc furnace in Rotherham and the downstream works at Stocksbridge.
The deal, if completed, would draw a line under one of the most drawn-out corporate collapses in recent British manufacturing history. SSUK has been in the hands of the official receiver since last August, when London’s High Court stripped ownership from the embattled metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta and declared the business “hopelessly insolvent”.
A successful sale would also hand ministers a rare piece of good news on the steel file. The Department for Business and Trade is already wrestling with the future of British Steel in Scunthorpe, the Chinese-owned blast furnace operation taken into state control roughly a year ago and now widely tipped for full nationalisation. Whitehall officials had privately floated the idea of bolting SSUK on to British Steel to create a single, state-shepherded speciality and long products champion, but sources suggest that option has fallen away under Blastr’s plans.
Confirmation of the exclusivity window came on Wednesday. “The official receiver will look to complete the sale at the earliest opportunity,” the Government said in a terse statement, with officials pointing to the tight five-week runway as a sign that negotiations are already well advanced.
For Blastr, the prize is considerable, but so is the challenge. The company does not yet own or operate a single working steel plant. Its flagship project is a greenfield site in Finland, where it plans to use green hydrogen to produce low-carbon iron and steel — a technology that remains commercially unproven at scale. The business is led by Mark Bula, a steel industry veteran who has held senior roles at large producers in India and the United States, and who is understood to be the driving force behind the push into the UK.
Industry watchers expect Blastr to require substantial external financing to take the Rotherham and Stocksbridge sites across the line. Even so, insiders argue that SSUK itself is a fundamentally viable business, long throttled by the chronic shortage of working capital that plagued the wider Liberty Steel group under Mr Gupta and left the plants unable to buy raw materials consistently. Gupta, whose globe-spanning GFG Alliance has contracted sharply in recent years as cash pressures mounted, fought to retain SSUK to the last, but was eventually overruled in court.
The Rotherham electric arc furnace is a particularly strategic asset. As Britain’s largest operational EAF, it is central to any credible vision of a lower-carbon domestic steel sector and produces the kind of speciality and engineering steels used by the aerospace, defence and oil and gas industries — customers the Government is keen to keep sourcing at home.
The response from the shop floor was cautiously welcoming. Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a national secretary of the GMB union and a former steelworker herself, said Liberty Steel employees “have been at the sharp end of years of uncertainty at this point — this needs to be a deal that secures the long-term future of steelmaking in South Yorkshire”. She added that “any sale of SSUK must include due diligence which guarantees ongoing operations and stability of the sites”, a pointed reminder that unions will scrutinise Blastr’s funding package and operational plan closely before offering unqualified support.
For a region that has watched its steelmaking heritage erode over decades, and for a Government anxious to demonstrate that its industrial strategy can deliver more than just holding operations, the coming five weeks will be among the most consequential yet for the future of British speciality steel.
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Norwegian green-steel start-up closes in on rescue deal for former Liberty works in South Yorkshire