Boston Metal raises $20 million to deliver electrolysis technology for ferroalloy production

Boston Metal has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from Prelude Ventures and The Engine. This funding accelerates the first industrial-scale deployments of Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) technology for the production of ferroalloys. The new funding also supports the continued scale-up of MOE for the production of emissions-free steel.

“Molten oxide electrolysis is a platform technology that can produce a wide array of metals and alloys, but our first industrial deployments will target the ferroalloys on the path to our ultimate goal of steel. Boston Metal’s MOE technology will offer the steel industry a modular, low-cost, and zero-emissions solution for the production of high-tonnage steel,” said Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal.

“Steel is and will remain one of the staples of modern society, but the production of steel today produces over two gigatons of CO2. The same fundamental method for producing steel has been used for millennia, but Boston Metal is breaking that paradigm by replacing coal with electrons.”

The MOE process uses electricity to transform metals from their raw oxide form into molten metal products. It was invented at the lab-scale at MIT, and Boston Metal has since scaled the technology over 1,000x. At the heart of the MOE cell is a soup of molten oxides tailored for a specific feedstock and product. Electrons act to melt this soup and selectively reduce the targeted oxide. The resulting metal pools at the bottom of the cell and is tapped by drilling into the cell in a process adapted from the blast furnace. The tap hole is then plugged and the process continues.

Boston Metal operates a fleet of semi-industrial MOE systems at its headquarters in Woburn, Mass., and will be commissioning its first industrial systems at this same facility.