CONROE, Texas -- Hertha Metals broke ground on Hertha Chalyx, its first commercial plant, designed to produce about 10,000 metric tons a year of steel-grade and magnet-grade high-purity iron combined.
Built next to Hertha's Pi100 pilot plant, Chalyx forms the first modern iron and steel innovation complex in the U.S., where Hertha will develop and scale its process for making primary iron and steel.
Hertha developed the "world's first single-step process for making iron and steel from ore." Iron ore and natural gas go into a single furnace, and either liquid steel or high-purity iron comes out by controlling process chemistry.
The process works with any grade of iron ore, including the low-grade fines that blast furnaces and direct reduction plants can't use, and produces iron and steel at 25% lower cost than the blast furnace route, with safer operations and ~50% lower emissions on natural gas, or up to 98% lower emissions using hydrogen.
“I founded Hertha Metals because I believed we could significantly improve how the world makes iron and steel from ore, and that an industry so fundamental to our future still had enormous room for invention,” said Dr. Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha Metals. “Over the last two years, our team has worked relentlessly to prove the promise of our technology through production. With Chalyx, we take the next step: proving the business and demonstrating that our technology can deliver commercially.
"We’re starting with high-purity iron to fill a critical gap in the domestic rare earth magnet supply chain, but the vision reaches much further. Successful commercial operations here will lay the foundation for our first 500,000-ton-per-year steel mill."
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Chalyx's first priority is high-purity iron for U.S. rare earth magnet manufacturers. NdFeB magnets are about 70% high-purity iron by weight and go into electric vehicles, wind turbines, data centers, robotics and defense systems.
An estimated 94% of the high-purity iron for those magnets is made in China. Hertha has already reached 99.95% purity at Pi100, the specification top magnet manufacturers require, and is in active supplier qualification with major U.S. rare earth magnet producers.
Chalyx will also produce iron and steel for trials with steel producers and manufacturers. Hertha's process is well suited for both low-grade and high-grade steels, including the electrical steel used in transformers and the grid. Commercial operations through Chalyx will establish the operating and economic foundation for Hertha’s next scale: its first ~500,000-metric-ton-per-year iron and steel mill.
The roughly $100 million plant will run on domestic iron ore, primarily from Minnesota's Iron Range, and Texas natural gas. Chalyx is expected to come online in late 2027, with magnet-grade high-purity iron production beginning in early 2028.
Hertha also named CV Engineering, a firm that specializes in steel industry design and construction, as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) partner for Chalyx. CV Engineering will lead engineering and construction through the plant's completion, and Hertha expects to work with the firm on future facilities as it scales.
"It's rare to build a new primary ironmaking plant around a process that's already running at pilot scale next door," said Kalyan Sennerikuppam, President and CEO of CV Engineering. "Our job is to take what Hertha has proven and build it to the standard the steel industry expects of any mill."
CV Engineering has delivered engineering and construction management on more than $50 billion in U.S. steel mill projects for industry leaders including Nucor, U.S. Steel, Big River Steel, Steel Dynamics, ArcelorMittal, and Hybar. That proven track record, backed by offices on three continents, is exactly what we wanted behind our pilot plant.
The groundbreaking follows Hertha's $133.65 million Series A, announced in September, which was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Doerr Capital and included a $65 million equity investment from the U.S. government through the Department of War's Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) program. Every investor from Hertha's earlier rounds took part in the Series A.
