After more than thirty years of research starting in the 1980s, and expenditure of more than one billion dollars, the HIsmelt process was successfully proven by Rio Tinto in Kwinana, Western Australia.
Due to the economic conditions in 2008, the Kwinana plant was closed and in 2014 some of the Kwinana equipment was transferred from Australia to China.
The new HIsmelt plant is located near Shouguang Port in Shandong Province, and is owned and operated by Molong Petroleum Machinery Limited, a private steel company. The Molong HIsmelt plant started up in 2016 and has produced more than 1,000,000 tonnes of hot metal at a cost lower than the local small blast furnaces previously used by Molong.
The hot metal ladles are delivered via road trucks to the Molong basic oxygen steelmaking plant located 40km south of the HIsmelt plant.
In 2017, Molong purchased the HIsmelt intellectual property from Rio Tinto, and will license the technology to other users in China and overseas.
The inherent flexibility of the HIsmelt process allows many types of iron bearing resources to be smelted.
This flexibility could be used to monetise iron bearing resources that cannot be economically smelted in blast furnaces due to high levels of impurities such as phosphorous, titanium and alkalis, or that have very fine particle sizes such as steel plant dusts and sludges
In addition, the HIsmelt process can use many types of carbon containing resources as the reductant including biomass. This offers a pathway to reduce the exposure of carbon taxes to iron smelting.
Molong and Acadia Iron are presently in discussions with more than ten companies that are interested in employing the HIsmelt technology in China, North America, Europe and Australasia.
CITATION:Goodman, N J, 2019. The HIsmelt technology: from Australia to China... and back again?, in Proceedings Iron Ore 2019, pp 313 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).