Iron Production by Molten Sulfide Electrolysis

Abstract

With greater urgency to combat the detrimental effects of global warming, industries globally have pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions or become carbon neutral by 2050, the iron and steel industry included. With exponential increase in the production and the demand of steel, the carbon footprint of the industry has also been rising at a high rate, accounting ~ 10 -11% of the global carbon emissions. Present state-of-art steel production technologies have not been environmentally benign due to their inextricable dependence on carbon, making complete elimination of GHG emissions challenging. As renewable energy becomes a reality for industrial usage, efforts to decarbonize steel manufacturing motivate a key need to search for technologies solely using electricity for iron ore reduction. Herein, the electrolytic production of molten iron using a novel sulfide route, molten sulfide electrolysis (MSE) is investigated. Experimental evidence for electrolysis and the key attributes and underlying thermodynamics of MSE for iron production are investigated and discussed, along with sulfidation; the feedstock preparation step for the MSE process.