Guillaume Lambotte¹, Richard Bradshaw¹, Tadeu Carneiro¹; ¹Boston Metal

Molten Oxide Electrolysis has been studied for decades at MIT by Professor Donald R. Sadoway. With support from NASA, the American Iron and Steel Institute, and the Deshpande Center at MIT, Prof. Sadoway’s laboratory demonstrated, at the laboratory-scale, that molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) could produce oxygen on the Moon as well as numerous metals here on Earth.In 2013, Antoine Allanore, Lan Yin and Donald R. Sadoway published results that showed that iron oxide can be reduced by MOE using an inert anode, therefore creating the opportunity for emission-free steel production.Boston Metal was founded by Prof. Sadoway, Prof. Allanore and Dr. Yurko to scale up the technology by addressing the scientific and technical challenges at a scale a thousand times larger than the laboratory experiments at MIT. Here we present some of the results obtained at the pilot-scale for the production of ferroalloys and steel.