Electra has found a cheap, clean way to purify iron, and is raising $257 million to make it happen

Electra has raised $76.3 million to clean up the dirty iron industry, TechCrunch has learned.

The startup has developed a new way to use electricity to extract pure iron from low-quality ores, opening the door to clean steel. The new financing round, which was revealed in Regulatory filingIt seeks to raise a total of $256.7 million.

Iron production today is highly polluting. It is responsible for the vast majority of emissions from the steel industry, which itself generates 7% of the world’s carbon emissions. The main process used to make iron today—smelting ore in high-temperature blast furnaces powered by burning fossil fuels—has remained largely unchanged for centuries.

As the industry sought to improve its behaviour, it began looking for alternatives. ElectraThe solution, known as electrowinning, is already used to produce other metals such as copper and nickel. Electrowinning uses an electrical current to pull metal from a liquid solution. The metal is plated onto an electrode while the impurities drop to the bottom of the tank.

But adapting the electrowinning process to iron has been difficult, in part because it typically requires high-quality ores, making the final product too expensive to compete with blast furnaces.

Electra claims that its acid-based process can handle lower grade ores. It heats the solution to about 60 degrees Celsius, which is below the boiling point of water, and then sends a current through it. The resulting panels are an ideal raw material for electric arc furnaces, which can also be powered by renewable energy.

When combined with electric arc furnaces, they have the potential to eliminate the majority of carbon emissions from steelmaking.

Electra last raised $85 million in 2022 from investors including Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BHP Ventures and Nucor.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.