Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries has developed technology that can produce green iron from iron ore, and it doesn’t involve hydrogen.
, 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 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.
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 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.
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.” 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.
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