Green steel from red mud through climate-neutral hydrogen plasma reduction

Red mud is the waste of bauxite refinement into alumina, the feedstock for aluminium production¹. With about 180 million tonnes produced per year¹, red mud has amassed to one of the largest environmentally hazardous waste products, with the staggering amount of 4 billion tonnes accumulated on a global scale¹. Here we present how this red mud can be turned into valuable and sustainable feedstock for ironmaking using fossil-free hydrogen-plasma-based reduction, thus mitigating a part of the steel-related carbon dioxide emissions by making it available for the production of several hundred million tonnes of green steel. The process proceeds through rapid liquid-state reduction, chemical partitioning, as well as density-driven and viscosity-driven separation between metal and oxides. We show the underlying chemical reactions, pH-neutralization processes and phase transformations during this surprisingly simple and fast reduction method. The approach establishes a sustainable toxic-waste treatment from aluminium production through using red mud as feedstock to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from steelmaking.