dri tio2 and energy consumption

I thought I would try to decipher some of what some of JW's figures (mentioned yesterday) re CO2 emissions mean. Bear with me.

He doesn't really present the underlying assumptions, so this is rough as guts.....

Assume...
Ilmenite feed:
50% TiO2
35% magnetite
12% haematite

Prices...
Syn rutile - 470 USD/t TiO2
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/timinmcs07.pdf

DRI - 250 USD/t 94% Fe
http://www.hbia.org/pdf/Vienna/02-WorldMarketforSRM.pdf

Using APG's ERMS/EAR/DRI process chain,
Gross income = 660USD/t TiO2

At 257 USD gross income per tonne CO2 produced (JW figure for APG),
CO2 generated = 2.57 tCO2/t TiO2 produced

By comparison, under the same assumptions, the Becher process figure becomes..
CO2 generated = 3.41 tCO2/t TiO2

The APG process uses 75% less energy than the Becher process to produce every tonne of TiO2

PLUS (!!!) ...it generates 0.7t DRI for every tonne TiO2 with that energy.

I seem to remember MT saying that the energy used to include DRI at the end of the process was only an additional 10%. If that is the case (leaving TiO2 aside), the CO2 generation for DRI alone is about 0.5 tCO2 per tonne DRI.

Compare this to the CO2 generated by the FINMET process (used by BHP at the Boodarie plant). According to a FINMET presentation in SA in 2003, CO2 generated by this process was about 1.0 tCO2/t DRI product. This is double my estimate for the incremental energy used for APG's DRI! Note that the energy cost constitutes about 30% of production costs for DRI, so this can reduce DRI production costs by 15%.

BHP may be interested in Corridor Sands in the short term, but that is just the start. I wonder if Chip reads HC??

Feel free to pull my figures apart! It is tricky sourcing public domain data.