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Electra has raised $ 180.4 million to clean house up the dirty ironmaking manufacture , TechCrunch has learned .
The startup has developed a fresh method acting of using electrical energy to wheedle virgin iron out of low - grade ores , start the door to cleaner blade . The new funding round , which was expose in aregulatory filing , seek to raise a total of $ 256.7 million .
Iron production today is extremely polluting . It ’s responsible for the vast majority of emission for steelmaking , which itself get 7 % of the earth ’s carbon emission . The main process used to make Fe today — melt ore in searing - hot flak furnaces drive by burning fogey fuel — has remained largely unchanged for century .
As the industry has look for to scavenge up its act , it has begin depend for alternatives . Electra ’s solution , known as electrowinning , is already used to produce other metal like copper and atomic number 28 . Electrowinning uses an electric flow to draw a metal out of a liquid result . The metal gets plated onto an electrode while impurities drop to the bottom of the tank .
But adapting electrowinning to iron has been challenging , in part because it normally require gamey - course ore , make the end product too expensive to vie with good time furnaces .
Electra claims that its acid - establish mental process can handle lower - level ores . It heats up the solution to about 60 degrees coulomb , which is below the boiling full stop of body of water , and then send a current through it . The resulting plates are ideal feedstock for electric - discharge furnaces , which can also run on renewable energy .
When combined , electrowinning and galvanic - arc furnaces have the potentiality to eliminate the bulk of steelmaking ’s carbon emissions .
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Electra last conjure $ 85 million in 2022 from investor including Amazon , Breakthrough Energy Ventures , BHP Ventures , and Nucor .
The company did not straight off reply to a request for scuttlebutt .
Update : correct the amount raise to escort .
