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by Gibbon1 868 days ago
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.

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