A single global company with 18 million tonnes of rolled steel capacity annually is to be launched through a consolidation of GFG Alliance’s steel businesses, with an ambition to lead the industry towards a carbon-neutral future.
The family owned alliance led by Sanjeev Gupta announced that Liberty Steel Group, which altogether employs 30,000 people in 10 countries, will be incorporated by the end of this year through a merger of GFG’s upstream and downstream steel manufacturing, mining and distribution businesses around the world.
Liberty Steel Group will be the eighth largest steel producer outside China, with operations stretching from Australia to continental Europe, the UK and the U.S., and it will have annual sales of approximately $15 billion. Although individual businesses will retain a high degree of autonomy, consolidated accounts will be produced and a united strategy will be developed.
At the heart of the group’s mission will be an ambition to build on GFG’s existing Greensteel strategy to aim for net carbon neutral status by 2030 – placing Liberty Steel Group on a pathway to become the first carbon neutral steel company in the world. This will include exploration of the best use of new technologies such as hydrogen generated from renewable power to produce steel.
The Greensteel strategy focuses on using electric arc furnaces to recycle scrap steel, rather than producing all material from scratch, as well as using renewable sources of energy. Steel from recycled scrap using fossil fuel based energy generates less than a third of the CO2 emissions compared with primary steel making, with the benefit dramatically increasing to almost zero emissions with the use of renewable power in Greensteel. Liberty’s plants already recycle three million tonnes of scrap steel annually, with investment underway in electric arc furnaces in the UK, Australia and the U.S.
Liberty Steel Group will include operations drawn from Liberty House in the UK, Liberty Steel Continental Europe, Liberty Steel USA, Infrabuild and Liberty Primary Steel and Mining Australia. It will be organised in three divisions: Liberty Primary Steel, Liberty GreenSteel and Liberty Engineered Steel.
Published in the December 2019 Edition