[beautifulfreak]

I was more impressed by the Science article from two weeks ago about cost effectively making iron from the toxic residue of aluminum refining: https://www.science.org/content/article/zapping-red-mud-plas...

[Gibbon1]

A group in Norway ran a pilot plant producing iron from sulfide ores back in the 1950's. Their paper quotes achieving 85% efficiency and around 4.7kwh/kg. It feels like with eletrowinning you can get the cost down to a few hundred dollars a metric ton. Scrap is around $200/ton. So not grossly uneconomic.

I think the devil is really in pre-processing ore. Whatever process can do that most cheaply is likely to win out. If you can figure out how to use waste like red mud so much that better.

[beautifulfreak]

A phys.org article goes into more detail about its cost effectiveness: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-team-green-steel-toxic-red.htm...