Investor News

EVENT: ECT to present at the Global Steel Innovations Forum

Event: The Global Steel Innovations Forum

Location: Dubai, UAE

Date: 25-27 September 2018

Linkhttp://www.steelvia.com/

ECT India Chairman & Managing Director Mr Ashley Moore will be presenting in conjunction with Ms Aditi Tarafdar, Technical Director at the India-based engineering firm, MN Dastur.

ECT has engaged MN Dastur to lead and deliver the basic engineering and design package for the integrated Coldry-Matmor R&D project with partners NLC India Limited and NMDC Limited.

Mr Moore and Ms Tarafdar will introduce steel industry delegates to the world's first lignite-based primary iron-making process, highlighting its competitive advantages, the pathway to commercialisation and its potential in India and abroad.

Two distinct advantages characterise the value proposition for Matmor:

  1. Alternative raw material opportunity
  2. Lower plant cost

The ‘alternative raw material’ opportunity

A vast ‘above-ground ore body’ exists in the form of iron ore mine fines, slimes, and industrial wastes such as mill-scale and nickel refinery tailings.

Current processes can’t utilise fines and wastes without expensive pre-processing. Matmor liberates this resource in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

Matmor enables a lower-cost primary iron production pathway by leveraging two unique features:

1) Decoupling iron making from coking coal
By utilising the rich organic chemistry within low-rank coal, the Matmor process uses a different chemical pathway to deliver a high-quality iron product without the need for high-quality coking coal. This results in decreased raw material costs and diversified supply options for customers.

2) Exploiting the ‘above-ground ore body’
By harnessing the vast ‘above-ground ore body’ that exists as mine tailings, fines, and slimes and from industrial wastes such as mill-scale and nickel refinery tailings, Matmor is able to leverage sunk mining and processing costs by providing a waste remediation solution that turns a contingent liability into a revenue stream.

Tailings storage locks up significant swathes of valuable land. Matmor minimises waste, releasing land for productive use and alleviating the environmental burden imposed by waste storage.

It is estimated that India has stockpiled ~100 million tonnes of such mine tailings, with current mining resulting in ~30% of mineral extraction adding to the stockpile annually.

Lower Plant Cost

  • The Matmor plant, incorporating Coldry as its front-end raw material preparation stage, is up to 40% less capital intensive than an equivalent capacity Blast Furnace or
    Coal-based DRI plant.
  • Relatively low operation temperatures reduce the material capital cost of the plant
  • Smaller equipment sizes, when compared to existing steel production processes, result in reduced land area requirements
  • Efficient reaction kinetics result in lower reductant requirements when compared to DRI technologies
  • Simple equipment design facilitates low maintenance requirements, high asset availability and a long production lifetime
  • Simple process flow and high levels of process automation allow for low operational staffing requirements
  • Very low water consumption compared with other DRI technologies

Abstract: The Coldry technology is a patented brown coal densification and pelletisation process that changes the naturally porous form of brown coal to produce a dry, dense, energy-rich pellet. Coldry technology will be utilized in the integrated demonstration plant as an efficient pelletisation process to supply composite Iron ore and lignite pellet feed for the Matmor process. Matmor is a technology used to produce high-quality DRI. The process operates at relatively low temperatures and is highly energy efficient. Utilizing novel reduction chemistry, the Matmor process has a favourable carbon intensity, generating significantly lower CO2 emissions and substantially lower water consumption while still producing high-quality DRI compared with conventional iron-making technologies. Given the utilization of low-rank coal and iron ore fines and reduction of CO2 emissions, feasibility studies indicate promising project economics with both CAPEX and OPEX advantages.