Strategies from Terry Walsh, Materials Processing Institute

After 30 years in industry, occupying top jobs at home and abroad, his plan was to take things a little easier but continue to do “bits and bobs” as he puts it.

An unexpected phone call while waiting for his wife to emerge from a branch of WH Smith turned those formative plans on their head when he realised he was the favoured candidate to run one of Teesside’s great steelmaking institutions.

Fast forward to early August, one month into his tenure, and Walsh can scarcely contain his excitement at the innovative work being done under the MPI’s expansive roof – or the global opportunities it can present.

He grins as he says: ‘I went to watch a steel melt last Thursday which was to produce a specialised alloy for use in a nuclear reactor. I spent an hour and a half watching what was going on and it is just really exciting. You watch it and you think “this is bloody magic what we’re doing here, just magic”.

‘It is proper, real production of important stuff and what you see melting and bubbling away in that furnace is the future of the British nuclear industry and you just think “that’s amazing!”

‘At the end of it a seven tonne bar of steel came out that made me feel proud. I sent a memo to all employees saying I was really proud of being able to see that in action and of the things they can do by bringing all their skills to bear.’

The MPI began life as the British Iron and Steel Research Association in 1944, becoming, essentially, the research and development hub for the entire British steelmaking industry.

Its reputation in developing pioneering techniques from embryonic stage to national roll-out is long established but it’s now about more than R&D.

As far as Walsh is concerned everything is in place to push for global growth and his stated ambition is to return the institute to its heyday of around 400 employees.

He says: ‘The more I learn, the more I realise there is so much opportunity here. What I have always done is find ways to grow businesses. In its heyday someone told me there were about 400 people here and now we have about 80 and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be thinking about getting back up to 400. For me it’s just a question of how quickly we can get there.

‘Part of the challenge is that the organisation was the R&D arm of Tata steel. It’s been an independent company now for 10 years but it has never been required to look at the commercial opportunities out there, it has always thought “we are R&D for UK steel” – which is right and that is our USP – but in terms of getting bigger then it’s about tapping into the commercial opportunities that exist everywhere.

‘That will benefit UK PLC, UK steel, UK cement and, if we have 400 people again back on site and we’re building more stuff here and looking for business everywhere, that will be the measure of my success. That’s my ambition and you have to have a target.’

Certainly in his last role, as MD of the German chemical manufacturer Ferro Duo GmbH, he would have given anything for the facilities at MPI.

He says: ‘We want to find solutions for UK industry but if someone is needed to solve similar issues for Germany and Japan, why wouldn’t it be us? I want to see what we can do for UK PLC but also look at global challenges rather than just focusing on the UK.

‘The company I was working for in Germany was trying to solve challenges for German cement and steel production and our issue in the company was that we couldn’t get the kit we needed. It exists but it is incredibly expensive. If someone were to look at replicating what we have here at MPI from scratch you would be talking about something in the order of £150m Euros in order to try to get the kit on the ground to do the work and that equipment already exists here, we have all the building blocks. The opportunities are huge.

‘We have the complete cradle to grave process. We have boffins with massive brains who do the research to say what megatrends are affecting industry and what challenges they might bring. We identify what technologies could be deployed and from there we have a significant number of labs to do the required research. We have the capability to take those lab-scale ideas and have them scaled up into pre industrial trials. In specific areas we can do those trials here ourselves.

‘So we can go from the research stage right through to pre industrial trial and post production analysis. It is a way of perfecting the process and ending up with the steel of the future in a decarbonised industrial process and to me that is a challenge – but it’s also a global opportunity.

‘With any business it is about recognising the core values of an organisation and keeping hold of and developing the good stuff. and there is so much good stuff here; the people, the knowledge, the assets, the location. I did my due diligence on the facility during the recruitment process and it cemented my impression that amazing work is going on at this place.

‘We’re constantly asking “what new things can we do?” We have ideas already there, I didn’t bring them, they existed already and we are looking at those and deciding which ones are the winners, the ones we put energy and resources into.’

One of those areas identified as a winner is the recycling of car batteries.

As the motor industry phases out fossil fuels and ramps up production of electric cars ever further, it presents the planet with a cleaner future but a thorny problem – how to recycle the batteries.

Taking into consideration the precious metals that go into their manufacture, a lucrative business of the future is taking shape.

Walsh says: ‘We are doing some work already on how we can recycle electric batteries because car batteries are the future for the car industry of course – but there is very little being done at the minute into how you can recycle the really valuable bits that go into those batteries – the cobalt lithium, scandium, vanadium, for example.

‘China controls a massive percentage of global production in the precious metals market, which makes everyone dependent on China.

‘But the production processes they use are environmentally horrible, so by coming up with technology where you can recycle the bits of equipment which those precious metals are already in, you decouple your supply chain from potentially geographically and politically sensitive areas and also you can do it in a way that is much more environmentally friendly than existing technologies.

‘We started some work in that area and arising from that we have a trial running where we are also looking at recycling the waste from alkaline batteries.

‘It’s a part of our work that excites me. Up here in the North East there are a lot of established industries that produce a lot of waste products where we can look at deploying this technology to see if we can extract those precious elements. They are only parts per million so you may process 100,000 tonnes of waste and come out with 17 tonnes, but that is so valuable that it pays for the treatment of the waste itself.

‘It means that environmentally you are doing a good thing, but also in terms of securing UK PLC and preserving its precious metals, we are doing that as well.’

For MPI there would be little point in pioneering green solutions if the political will isn’t there to enforce their good work.

Dialogue has started already with the new Government aimed at underwriting the vital research and development being done at the institute into decarbonised solutions.

Terry Walsh said: ‘Coming up with solutions for the sake of the planet is one thing but it has to be supported by policy. We need a joined up approach to making sure the efforts we are going to in decarbonising the UK and European production route are rewarded and protected.

‘The dialogues have started and I think they have a real desire to recognise the challenge coming to UK steel and want to engage to see what can be done about that.”

• The full version of this interview was printed in BUSINESSiQ magazine. To subscribe for free, go to bit.ly/businessiqsubscription