Fortescue lab succeeds in turning iron ore into green iron
Fortescue Future Industries has built a pilot plant that can turn iron ore into green iron without hydrogen – or coal – as part of its quest to slash carbon emissions from steel production.The FFI research team achieved the breakthrough in less than a year since it set up laboratories and an office in the backstreets of Balcatta in Perth. This is where the project, talked up by Andrew Forrest when Fortescue Metals Group and stable mate FFI handed down half-year results, is taking shape in semi-secrecy.
Anand Bhatt with a nugget of Fortescue’s green iron. Trevor Collens
The iron ore billionaire’s comments on February 15, documented by The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window column, cryptically promoted a “major breakthrough”. Dr Forrest said: “to give a clue to all our competitors out there, it uses a membrane and they’re going to have to come and talk to us if they want to borrow the membrane”.
FFI has a long way to go from processing by the kilogram to processing at industrial scale.
FFI scientists had only switched on the pilot plant – about the size of three shipping containers – 24 hours earlier and fed in 150 kilograms of iron ore.
The process is closely guarded, but is based on reducing iron ore to green iron electrochemically using electrons, rather than hydrogen. There is no need to make hydrogen, store it, compress it and then feed it into a conversion plant.
In making it this far – from beaker scale to pilot plant in a little over 12 months – the FFI scientists have come up with about 100 innovations and created a bespoke electrolyser, control systems and other elements built from scratch.
‘It is all bespoke’
“Essentially, it is all bespoke. You couldn’t go to Bunnings and buy part x, y, z because this process didn’t exist,” one scientist said.
The prize is huge if the technology ever makes it out of the pilot phase. Fortescue’s scope 3 emissions, those produced by the steel makers that buy its iron ore, are about 250 million tonnes a year.
Steel making, reliant on coking coal and blast furnaces, makes up about 10 per cent of global emissions. It is estimated two-thirds of those emissions occur in converting iron ore to iron.
The success at Balcatta comes with FFI and others also pursuing a direct reduced iron (DRI) route to green steel using hydrogen as a reductant. That process is considered more technically mature and lower risk, but it poses challenges around the likely cost, including for hydrogen.
A big advantage of the FFI alternative under development at Balcatta is that it happens under a lower temperature process, 100C compared with 800C to 1000C, and is more compatible with renewable energy.
The research team numbers about 45, including 12 PhDs, with former CSIRO scientists Michael Dolan and Anand Bhatt in leadership roles.
When pushed by a JPMorgan analyst for more details on the green iron breakthrough last month, Dr Forrest joked: “Look, that I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
FFI has developed considerable expertise in membranes after acquiring US company Ionix, formerly Exergy.
Membranes are found in nearly every electrochemical device used in industrial and scientific applications, but the membrane referenced by Dr Forrest is not the centrepiece of the work at Balcatta.
The research team suggested its breakthrough was not about the membrane but the 100 different innovations that make the pilot plant work. FFI chief executive Mark Hutchinson said the company was agnostic about which route emerged as the best in making green iron and reducing steel-making emissions.
“I think we’re kind of at a point [with the Balcatta research] where it’s like, ‘OK, it works’,” he said. “150 kilograms is better than it being a science project, but it’s not scale ... so early days. It’s still going to take a lot of work to scale it, but this is part of our journey.”
Dr Hutchinson said that WA, where Fortescue mined iron ore alongside Rio Tinto, BHP and Gina Rinehart, was the ideal place to produce the huge amounts of renewable energy that would be required if the research led to industrial-scale application.
“When you start to scale it to say 100,000 tonnes, there is an enormous amount of renewable energy you need to do it,” he said.
“If there’s anywhere you could do it, it is the Pilbara because you have the opportunity to build massive scale renewable energy that could convert iron ore to iron, and then you basically sell the decarbonised chips to China.”
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