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A new way to make steel could reduce America’s reliance on imports
Hertha Metals, founded by MIT alumna Laureen Meroueh, invented and demonstrated the first single-step steelmaking technology using natural gas and electricity to produce steel and high-purity iron for magnets cost-effectively.
“The company’s next plant, which will be capable of producing 10,000 tons of steel each year, will also be producing high-purity iron for permanent magnets, which are used in electric motors, robotics, consumer electronics, aerospace and military hardware.
“It’s insane that we don’t make rare earth magnets domestically,” Meroueh says. “It’s insane that any country doesn’t make their own rare earth magnets. Most rare earth magnets are permanent magnets, so neodymium magnets. What’s interesting is that by weight, 70 percent of that magnet is not a rare earth, it’s high-purity iron. America doesn’t currently make any high-purity iron, but Hertha has already made it in our pilot plant.”
Hertha plans to quickly scale up its production of high-purity iron so that, by 2030, it will be able to meet about a quarter of total projected demand for magnets in the U.S.
After that, the company plans to run a full-scale commercial steel plant in partnership with a steel manufacturer in America. Meroueh says that plant, which will be able to produce around half a million tons of steel each year, should be operational by 2030.
“We are eager to partner with today’s steel producers so that we can collectively leverage the existing infrastructure alongside Hertha’s innovation,” Meroueh says. “That includes the $1.5 billion of capital downstream of a melt shop that Hertha’s process can integrate into. The melt shop is the ore-to-liquid steel portion of the steel mill. That’s just the start. It’s a smaller scale than a conventional plant in which we still economically out compete traditional production processes. Then we’re going to scale to 2 million tons per year once we build up our balance sheet.””
