The Minerals Down Under Flagship is conducting research to secure the future of Australia’s carbon steel materials industry.

Securing the future of Australia's carbon steel materials industry

The Minerals Down Under Flagship is working with industry and partners in the Australian innovation system to help address Australia’s key national challenges and opportunities in the minerals domain. One of the areas of focus for the flagship is the future viability of the nation’s carbon steel materials – iron ore, manganese ore and coking coal.

• 20 April 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• A valuable industry
• Future challenges
• Our goal

A valuable industry

Carbon steel materials – iron ore, manganese ore and coking coal – generate around A$46 billion a year in export revenue and make a major contribution to Australia’s balance of trade.

As the mines that provide high quality ores and coal are gradually becoming depleted, alternative but lower-grade resources are being developed and mined to meet demand.

However, these new resources generally have higher impurity levels such as alumina and phosphorus in iron ore.

Future challenges

In contrast, enormous resources of high-grade iron ore in South America, West Africa and India are being evaluated by multi-national mining companies. These are companies that do not have allegiance to any one country and make their decisions on where to mine based on risk versus return.

Geopolitical risks in Australia are low, so we need to ensure that development and operational risks also remain low.

It is critical that CSIRO continues to develop effective, economic and environmentally friendly ways of utilising our lower-grade resources

Our goal

Minerals Down Under will develop new processing technologies for carbon steel materials to unlock over A$500 billion of sub-economic deposits and maintain Australia’s dollar share of the world carbon steel materials market at a minimum of current levels until 2018 despite declining grades and quality.

We will achieve this by developing new processing technologies, products and blends that maximise the value-in-use of Australia’s carbon steel raw materials, therefore maximising their value and attractiveness to international customers.

Five research streams have been developed to achieve this goal. Each stream is made up of a series of integrated research projects focused on specific challenges.

The five streams are:

• Predicting processing performance
• Impurity removal
• Agglomeration development and optimisation
• Coke modelling and optimisation
• ISO standards for international trade.

Read more about them in the following pages.