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Different thing. Electric arc furnaces are old technology.

What is new here is direct reduction of iron ore to iron metal, electrolytically. It makes the input feedstock for your EAFs.

Smelting has always been the most carbon-intensive part of steelmaking.



There's also what's called an electric smelt furnace, that has a couple of variations, currently being trialed by two global scale producers at bigger than MIT lab scale, but less than production:

ESF- https://www.energyinnovation.net.au/article/the-electric-sme...

Fortescue- https://metals.fortescue.com/en/our-projects/green-metal-pro...

BlueScope, BHP and Rio Tinto- https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2024/bluescope-bhp...




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