Vale and Ternium to build iron ore briquette plant in Brazil

Brazil’s Vale and Latin America’s leading steelmaker Ternium will build a briquette plant in Santa Cruz, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. This is reported by SteelOrbis.

In this way, Ternium aims to reduce emissions from its slab production, which is expected to decrease by 10%, as briquettes will reduce the use of sinter in the blast furnace. The sintering process is typically one of the main sources of emissions at integrated steel mills.

The project has received an accelerated approval procedure from the Rio de Janeiro state environmental authority (INEA) with a simplified environmental report (RAS) instead of the traditional one.

This initiative is part of a memorandum of understanding between Vale and Ternium signed in 2021 to develop projects aimed at decarbonizing the steel industry. Vale has been developing briquette production for ten years, which has simplified the process and made it less carbon-intensive.

At the end of last year, Vale opened the world’s first iron ore briquette plant at Tubarão in Brazil. A second such facility will be commissioned in 2024. The total production capacity of the two facilities will be 6 million tons of briquettes per year, with an investment of $256 million.

As GMK Center reported earlier, in March this year, the US Department of Energy selected Vale USA (a subsidiary of Vale) to start negotiations on financing the construction of an iron ore briquette plant worth up to $282.9 million in the United States.