Rio Tinto will invest $143 million (AUD 215 million) to build an industrial experimental facility in Western Australia to further evaluate the efficiency of the low-carbon iron refining process BioIron™ biomass iron refining technology to support the carbon reduction of the global steel value chain.
The industrial experimental facility will be built in the Rockingham Strategic Industrial Area in the south of Perth. Prior to this, Rio Tinto has successfully tested this innovative iron refining process in a small pilot plant in Germany.
BioIron uses biomass and microwave energy instead of coal in the steel production process to convert Pilbara iron ore into metallic iron. If combined with renewable energy and fast-growing biomass carbon cycle, BioIron is expected to reduce up to 95% of carbon emissions compared to the traditional blast furnace converter process.
The BioIron industrial experimental facility developed this time will include a pilot plant, which is ten times the size of the previous pilot plant in Germany. This innovative steel production process will also be semi-industrialized for the first time, and it is expected to produce one ton of direct reduced iron per hour. The facility will provide the necessary evaluation data for the expansion of BioIron technology to a larger scale demonstration plant.
The pilot plant is jointly designed by Rio Tinto, the University of Nottingham, Metso Corporation, and the Western Australian engineering company Sedgeman Onyx. The manufacturing of related equipment will start this year and is expected to be put into production in 2026.
