What is hot metal?
Fortescue has produced its first hot metal at Christmas Creek. But what exactly is hot metal, how is it normally made and why does this milestone matter? We break it down.
We made hot metal. What exactly is it?
Fortescue has produced its first hot metal at the Green Metal Project at Christmas Creek.
For the first time, we’ve successfully operated the project’s electric smelting process – another step in our work towards producing green iron in Australia.
If you are wondering what “hot metal” means, you are not alone. It’s an iron and steel industry term – and it’s simpler than it sounds.
First things first: what is hot metal?
Put simply, hot metal is iron-rich metal that is hot enough to be liquid.
That’s really it.
It is an important step on the journey from turning iron ore to the steel used to make things we see every day – from buildings and cars to machinery and energy infrastructure.
Once hot metal is produced, it can be turned into steel. Steelmakers use oxygen to remove excess carbon and other elements from the liquid metal. This produces liquid steel, which is then cast and cooled before being made into different products.
If you want the very short version:
Iron ore -> hot metal -> steel -> the products we use every day.
How do you make hot metal?
This is where things get a little more interesting.
Traditionally, hot metal is made in a blast furnace – a large furnace that uses iron ore, coke (made from coal) and limestone at very high temperatures.
But here's the important bit: the coke isn't just there to make things hot.
Iron ore contains iron bonded with oxygen. To produce iron, that oxygen needs to be removed. In a traditional blast furnace, carbon from coke helps create the conditions needed to separate the oxygen from the iron ore.
The iron melts and collects at the bottom of the furnace as hot metal, while unwanted materials separate from it and can be removed.
And that brings us to the tricky part.
Carbon plays an important role in traditional ironmaking. It helps generate the intense heat required, but also plays a part in separating iron from oxygen. Both contribute to carbon emissions.
So, simply swapping one energy source for another doesn't solve the whole problem.
To really change how iron is made, we also need to rethink the process itself.
And that matters well beyond the furnace. Iron and steel are essential to modern life, but making them is also a significant source of global carbon emissions. Finding lower-emissions ways to produce iron is an important part of the challenge to decarbonise the steel industry.
Here’s where we’re doing things differently
We’re working towards a different way of producing iron from Pilbara ore – one that can ultimately avoid the carbon-intensive processes traditionally used to make it.
That's a difficult problem to solve. Nobody has yet produced green iron from Pilbara ore on a commercial scale.
At our Green Metal Project at Christmas Creek, we're testing technologies and processes that could help us get there. One part of that is electric smelting.
Instead of a traditional blast furnace, we’re using an electric smelting furnace to turn iron-rich material into molten hot metal. The pathway we’re developing also needs an earlier step that removes much of the oxygen from the ore before electric smelting.
What did we actually achieve?
For the first time, our electric smelting furnace successfully produced hot metal.
As part of commissioning, we used a blended feedstock to test the furnace while progressively bringing the facility online
Think of this first run as exactly what a pilot is meant to do: test the process, see how it performs and learn from it.
One important box: ticked. But we’re not at the finish line yet.
Does that mean we’ve made green iron?
Not yet.
And that’s an important distinction.
Producing first hot metal doesn’t mean we’ve solved commercial-scale green iron production using Pilbara ore.
The Green Metal Project is a pilot. We’ll continue commissioning it in stages, safely testing, learning from and improving the process as we go. We still need to understand how the technology performs with the intended feedstock and what it will take to make it work at a much larger scale.
Why first hot metal matters
Because big industrial challenges aren’t solved in one giant leap.
They’re solved by proving the pieces along the way.
Producing first hot metal shows us that the electric smelting furnace can successfully turn our test feedstock into molten metal.
The bigger goal is to develop a pathway for producing green iron from Pilbara ore at commercial scale here in Australia.
The simple takeaway
If you've made it this far, you now know your hot metal.
It's molten, iron-rich metal on its way to becoming steel. Traditionally, producing it relies heavily on carbon.
We’re testing a different pathway, including electric smelting, as we work towards producing green iron from Pilbara ore.
Our first hot metal shows that an important part of that process is working. Now we keep testing, learning and figuring out what it will take to go bigger.
Still curious?
Hot metal is only one part of the story. Go a little deeper with:
Could green iron be Australia’s next big export opportunity?