How will technology advances affect the production of Ferroalloys in the future?

Products from Ferroalloy industry are crucial for our daily life and their importance is increasing. The industry is facing several challenges that need to be solved. Technological advance is, as is the tradition in this industry, expected to be a main contributor to overcome these. Important challenges are to ensure sustainable production with net zero CO₂ emission and low environmental footprint, economic feasibility with increasing energy scarcity and cost, and also to meet the expected changes in raw material quality and availability and political aims to be self sufficient with critical raw materials within own regions as for instance Europe. This is expected to trigger developments of completely new processes and technologies, new technologies for preprocessing and postprocessing and developments in furnace technologies as well as competence to improve existing production processes. Developments are often necessarily, alloy specific and related to the conditions for producing a specific alloy or related to high temperature processes at reducing conditions which is the case for most of metal production. At the same time there is a rapid technological development within other metal producers and other sectors that the ferroalloy industry can benefit from. Ferroalloy furnaces are to some extent like a “black box” with limited possibility to measure conditions inside. Expected advances within sensor technologies have thus a potential to improve existing processes and increase feasibility of new processes. A prerequisite to benefit from this, is that new data from the sensors are coupled to and used to increase process competence. This can be followed by better simulations of the process and use of AI tools. Changes in raw material qualities is an example of a challenges that is expected to generate to and benefit from technological advances. Raw material with lower content of valuable element must be upgraded before use giving raw materials with finer particle size. Technologies where furnaces or reactors can be fed with fines instead of lump materials and technologies for production of agglomerates will thus probably be developed within several branches. Use of composite agglomerates and adaption of furnace design and process operation is a natural part of this. Technological advances are expected both within raw materials, furnace technologies, sensor and others. Examples of different combinations of challenges and possible technological advances, and how they can contribute to developments in the ferroalloy industry will be presented and discussed.