Brazilian mining company Vale and Spanish company Hydnum Steel have agreed to build an iron ore briquette plant in Spain.
The companies signed a preliminary agreement to consider developing a new factory within Hydnum's green steel project in the city of Puertollano, Vale said.
The plant will initially have capacity of 1.5mn metric tonnes (t) of laminated steel in 2026 and will reach 2.6mn t/yr as of 2030.
The agreement comes nearly two months after Vale launched the first iron ore briquette plant in the world, in Brazil's southeastern Espirito Santo state. The plant and today's agreement are part of the company's push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Vale's iron ore briquette — an input to produce hot-briquetted iron, an intermediate product between iron ore and steel — comes from the low-temperature agglomeration of high-quality iron ore using a technological solution of binders, which gives the final product higher mechanical strength.
