An interdisciplinary UNLV team — backed by a $2.1 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) — is innovating a unique, clean energy solution to replace blast furnace technology, a centuries-old steel production method that has long powered one of the world’s dirtiest industries. 

The funding, announced last week, is part of the Revolutionizing Ore to Steel to Impact Emissions (ROSIE) program, which aims to advance zero-process-emission ironmaking and ultra-low life cycle emissions steelmaking. The iron and steel industry accounts for 11% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

“That’s a lot of carbon to produce something that’s really important around the world,” said Jeremy Cho, lead researcher and mechanical engineering professor at UNLV. “It’s a huge amount, and the DOE is looking for radically new ways to make that net-zero.”

Cho’s team — one of just 13 nationwide — has signed up for that challenge.

Over the next three years, they’re pioneering a technology that can “scale up and compete” with the industry-standard blast furnace method by using a room-temperature approach in an aqueous system for iron production — a huge departure from the high-temperature environment of the blast furnace method.

The technology would use a process called electrowinning to convert pulverized iron ore into pure iron that is deposited on a cathode. Electrowinning is one method that’s currently used to make certain metals, like copper. The approach leverages a rotating impeller to speed up chemical reactions tenfold and facilitate the transport of iron to the electrode. 

“Our plan is to take iron ore particles, put them into a water mixture and apply electric fields between two or more electrodes,” he said. “This starts to look like a chemistry experiment, but our innovation is that we include a rotor to help mix the chemicals around, which should allow us to achieve really fast rates of iron production.”

Cho says that electrowinning can be scaled up, but has yet to be done at scale with iron. His team’s goal is to create a laboratory-scale prototype of an impeller-accelerated reactor that produces one kilogram of iron per hour of over 98% purity for 10 hours.

“There’s been some early-stage research on this to show that this is possible, but not at an output scale that’s applicable for industrial use,” said Cho. “If we ultimately want to switch the world’s iron production to a carbon neutral technique, then it has to be cost-competitive.” 

The UNLV team is among just a handful spanning industry and academia tackling the same problem, with the ultimate goal of bringing these technologies to market with the possibility to apply for funding to demonstrate at a larger, pilot scale.

Other members of the team include UNLV geoscience professor Andrew Martin, UNLV civil and environmental engineering professor Marie-Odile Fortier, Dev Chidambaram at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Ben Xu at the University of Houston.

“It’s going to be pretty exciting to investigate a way to decarbonize a material that is part of so many other products,” Fortier, a life cycle assessment expert, said. “And in that way, we’re going to be able to lower their carbon footprint as well.”

Martin agreed. The U.S., he said, has very low-grade iron ore, which means the industry has to put a lot more energy into the steel production process.

“It’s about making use of what we’ve got,” Martin said.