Fortescue hails “green iron” breakthrough as own coal-free tech moves to pilot phase

Fortescue Future Industries says it has successfully processed “green iron” ore that it says marks a “breakthrough technology” and a major step away from the use of fossil fuels in the steel-making process, one of the world’s dirtiest industries.

The new technology – which is free of coal and carbon – uses a renewable powered chemical electrolysis process that was first proven in the company’s own Western Australia laboratories.

The milestone comes 12 months after the team produced a few milligrams of metallic iron in the laboratory, proving that the chemical process could actually work.

At the half-year earnings call for Fortescue Metals Group in February, FFI CEO Mark Hutchinson revealed that “sizable volumes” – this week revealed to be 150kg – of zero-carbon metallics had since been produced in the lab.

Questioned at the time about the technology behind the achievement, the company’s billionaire founder Andrew Forrest joked that if he told anyone what it was, he would have to kill them.

“Let me just say that… to give a clue to all our competitors out there, it uses a membrane. And they’re gonna have to come and talk to us if they want to borrow the membrane,” Forrest said.

But a few more details have been forthcoming this week, with FFI revealing on Friday that the company’s iron ore is being converted to metallic iron using electrolysis, where an electric current is used directly to remove oxygen from the iron oxide ore at a low temperature, removing the need to use coal.

And this week’s big news is that the technology has now come out of the lab and graduated to a pilot plant.

Hutchinson says that the sheer size of the iron and steel industry means FFI’s technology will need to be scaled many times over before it can be deployed commercially. But progress, at least, is being made.

“We know the world is going to want iron ore and steel for a long time, but the level of emissions coming from that process is unsustainable,” he said. “We need a greener industry powered by green energy.

“The fact that the technology developed by our FFI team can come out of the laboratory and into a pilot plant is a key milestone because it shows that a real-world application has potential.”

The focus for FFI’s R&D team is now on increasing scale and decreasing costs of the technology to enable it to compete with traditional steelmaking processes.

See also: BHP to pilot green smelting furnace using electricity, hydrogen and Pilbara iron ore