After years of developing its patented Rock Refinery in stealth, Brimstone announced plans to co-produce steel, aluminum, magnesium, titanium and other critical minerals, in addition to its previously announced products of portland cement, smelter grade alumina and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM).
“Brimstone’s Rock Refinery has the potential to fundamentally change how we produce the building blocks of civilization and prosperity, including cement, steel and aluminum,” said Brimstone CEO Cody Finke. “These materials represent a $2.4 trillion market and 95% of all mined materials on the planet, and today are manufactured through separate, capital-intensive processes. For the first time in history, Brimstone will produce them through a single process –cheaply, efficiently and sustainably – transforming global supply chains and unlocking material abundance.”
Co-production is a proven strategy in heavy industry, having already reshaped dozens of commodity markets and established three great refineries: oil, fertilizers and complex metallic sulfides (copper, platinum group metals, etc.). Brimstone is building the fourth great refinery.
Its Rock Refinery will use this same strategy to produce on-spec cement, steel (iron), aluminum and other critical materials, all from globally abundant feed rocks. The first plant will debut the minimum viable process, which will produce cement, alumina and SCM. Future plants will deliver additional products.
Because Brimstone’s process uses a carbon-free rock, it avoids the CO2 found in limestone that accounts for about 60% of the carbon emissions from incumbent cement producers, noted the producer. It is also energy-agnostic and fully electrifiable. When solely using clean energy and inputs, Brimstone’s carbon emissions are zero.
Brimstone is currently engineering its demonstration-scale plant to be constructed near Reno, Nev., which will produce quantities of cement, alumina and SCM.