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Tech firms and automakers both need lots of steel to build their data centers and vehicles. The metal is sturdy, ubiquitous — and highly carbon-intensive when it’s produced using traditional coal-fired furnaces.
The startup Electra says it’s working to scale a dramatically cleaner method for making the key material. On Tuesday, the company unveiled the site of its new demonstration plant in Jefferson County, Colorado. Electra also announced purchase agreements with the tech giant Meta and with Nucor and Toyota Tsusho America, both of which supply steel to car manufacturers.
Instead of using a scorching furnace, Electra produces iron — the main ingredient in steel — with electrochemical devices, which are powered by renewables and can run at the same temperature as a fresh cup of coffee. The method, known as “electrowinning,” is time-tested for removing impurities from metals like copper, nickel, and zinc. Now Electra is using it to make high-purity iron.
“We’re reinventing how iron has been made for centuries through an electrified process,” Sandeep Nijhawan, the startup’s cofounder and CEO, told Canary Media ahead of this week’s announcement.
Steelmaking is responsible for up to 9% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that pollution comes from the coal-fueled blast furnaces that convert iron ore into iron.
Electra will soon begin installing equipment inside an existing 130,000-square-foot building south of the company’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. The demonstration project is backed by a new $50 million grant from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, adding to the $186 million Electra raised from investors earlier this year and its $8 million tax credit from the Colorado Energy Office.
The plant is set to start operations in mid-2026 and will deliver up to 500 metric tons of iron per year — a minuscule amount compared to the roughly 1.4 billion metric tons of iron produced globally in 2023. But it’s an important step toward commercializing the emerging technology, the company and its partners say.
Nucor, the largest U.S. steel producer and an early investor in Electra, has committed to purchasing iron from the demonstration facility, which it will then add to electric arc furnaces to make steel. Toyota Tsusho America said it plans to sell Electra’s clean iron to steelmakers, then distribute the resulting steel to automakers. A third partner, Germany’s Interfer Edelstahl Group, will use the iron in its specialty steel applications.
“We’re excited to see Electra’s demonstration facility become a reality,” Al Behr, Nucor’s executive vice president of raw materials, said in an Oct. 21 press release. He added that the project “lays the groundwork for a new era of low-carbon materials.”
Meta, for its part, struck a different type of deal to buy environmental attribute certificates from Electra. This relatively new concept allows the data-center developer to count the emissions reductions associated with a ton of Electra’s iron toward Meta’s own sustainability targets. The certificates won’t apply to the iron that other partners buy, but rather to a separate batch, Electra said.
Through its offtake agreement, Meta aims to “demonstrate a pathway for these innovative materials to scale,” John DeAngelis, the firm’s head of clean technology innovation, said in the press release.
Electra and its partners didn’t provide more details about the financial value or volumes of iron associated with the new deals.
Electra launched in 2020 with a vision to “use renewable electricity, along with electrochemistry, to produce iron without using fossil fuels,” said Nijhawan, who cofounded the company with Quoc Pham. The startup now operates two pilot plants at its research lab in Boulder, though it didn’t disclose how much clean iron it’s produced to date.
Across the steel industry, another alternative to the blast-furnace process is already gaining traction: “direct reduced iron” production, which can use fossil gas or hydrogen. About 9% of global iron was made this way in 2023.
A handful of commercial-scale direct-reduction projects are underway in Europe and China that will specifically use green hydrogen made with renewable power, which could curb the overall CO2 emissions from steelmaking by up to 90%. Among the most prominent efforts is Stegra’s green-steel plant in northern Sweden that’s set to be completed in late 2026 or early 2027.
Green-steel developers have recently faced soaring production costs, uncertain market demand, and a shifting policy landscape, leading some companies to cancel or postpone projects. Last week, Stegra said it plans to raise another $1.1 billion in funding to build its first-of-a-kind facility, for which the steelmaker has already raised $7.6 billion. In the United States, meanwhile, the Trump administration is gutting federal funding for producing low-carbon hydrogen meant to benefit industries like steelmaking.
“We are seeing a slowdown in the market among our peers, which is also exacerbated by the policy uncertainty” in the U.S., Nijhawan said. “But our long-term and even near-term strategies remain unchanged.”
Electra’s technology is still in the early stages of development, while direct-reduction plants have operated for decades, albeit using fossil fuels. But if electrowinning can scale, it would offer a few key advantages.
The method involves dissolving iron ore into a water-based acid solution to separate iron ions from impurities in the ore. The company then electrifies the solution to deposit pure iron onto sheets the size of a basketball backboard. This process doesn’t require fossil fuels or hydrogen. It can also incorporate iron ores with more impurities — such as those from older mines — than direct-reduction plants typically use, giving Electra access to cheaper materials.
Plus, electrowinning doesn’t need constant, extreme heat, so Electra can tune its operations to the fluctuations of wind and solar power plants, ramping up when clean electricity is most available and affordable. The company said it purchases 100% renewable energy for its Boulder pilot operations through an Xcel Energy utility program, which Electra will also leverage for its Jefferson County demonstration facility.
As the five-year-old firm prepares to open its new plant, Electra is already looking for places to build a commercial-scale manufacturing site, which could be operational in 2029.
The steel industry is “definitely in this phase where the [green steel] transition and meeting climate goals looks a lot more difficult today,” Nijhawan said. But, he added, “I believe the solutions are in hand, and it’s a matter of scaling to drive those economics as fast as we can.”
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