Could a new iron ore mine turn Minnesota into a green steel powerhouse?

An enormous shed sits on a ridge northeast of Calumet, Minnesota, along the state’s Iron Range, visible for miles to drivers rushing by on Highway 169.

To reach it by car, I exited the highway at Nashwauk (population 950, give or take) and drove down a lonely county road, eventually pulling up to a security building. Inside, I watched a safety video while a guard stood nearby screening a steady stream of hulking work trucks. (“One of those days,” she said.) I still had to go nearly another three miles — past rough parking lots with more work trucks and onto a red-dirt road — before finally arriving at a construction site the size of a small city.

I was in the heart of Mesabi Metallics, an ore mining and processing complex under development by Essar Group, a family-owned industrial conglomerate based in India. The sprawling facility is on track to start producing iron pellets by this fall, according to the latest estimates. It will be Minnesota’s first new iron mine in 50 years.

Mine officials won’t confirm an exact start date, but when I visited the site in February, president and CEO Joe Broking told me that ​“it’s a matter of when and not if Mesabi Metallics will open for business.” 

On July 13, Mesabi blasted its first chunk of iron ore.

Once the mine is fully operational, huge diggers will extract raw iron ore in an open-pit mine not far from Broking’s office. Then enormous dump trucks will each cart up to 400 tons of the material at a time to a series of machines that will grind it into ever-finer particles. The later stages of the process will take place in one of the site’s biggest buildings — that ​“shed” I thought I saw from the highway — where giant cylinders will pulverize the ore into particles slimmer than a human hair. Other equipment will mix the powder into a stream of recycled water to create an iron-rich slurry that will be further purified elsewhere in the building. Finally, the mixture will be pumped a couple of miles away to a pelletizing plant to be formed into marble-size balls that great furnaces will sear until hard enough to survive a journey by rail and water to steel mills around the world.

Essar’s $2.5 billion facility has been in the works for decades, through commodity market collapses, corporate restructurings, a global financial crisis, and a yearslong legal battle over mineral leases. Things looked dicey at several points along the way. But by the time Broking came onboard in 2024, ​“the thing [Essar’s owners] were certain of is that they were going to complete this project,” he said. ​“And that gave me a lot of confidence.” 

Now, Mesabi Metallics has a crucial role to play in the future of steel production and of the region named after its literal bedrock industry. The pelletizing plant will have the capacity to produce 7 million tons each year of concentrated iron pellets for direct reduction, a low-carbon way of turning iron ore into iron ready for steelmaking. The DR-grade pellets will advance one of Essar’s corporate mandates: to clean up an industry that accounts for about 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’re going to be the cleanest iron ore mine in North America — in the world, arguably, by quite a long ways. And at the same time, we’ll be extremely competitive” on cost, Broking said. ​“To be sustainable, our philosophy is we have to do both.”

Mesabi Metallics has some competition on the Iron Range. About an hour away, the Ohio-based steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs turns iron pulled out of its mines into DR-grade pellets for shipment to its home state. U.S. Steel, now majority-owned by Japan’s Nippon Steel, has its own DR-grade plant nearby that could — eventually — feed a lower-emissions ironmaking facility it’s developing in Arkansas. Two local entrepreneurs are separately pursuing plans to harvest iron ore from mine waste and likewise ship it out of state for use in lower-emissions steelmaking. One of those entrepreneurs expects the global market for DR-grade pellets to quadruple by 2034.

As steelmaking evolves, those investments could keep the Iron Range’s namesake industry relevant for a few decades to come. Experts are skeptical, however, that they’ll do much to reverse the slow demographic decline that began before most of the workers building Essar’s new mine were born. To accomplish that, northeastern Minnesota may need to claim a much bigger piece of the green steel future.

In his office, Broking reiterated the company’s long-term vision for vertically integrated, low-carbon steelmaking at the Nashwauk site. But he added that no investment decisions toward that end have been made. 

“Between Mesabi Metallics and Essar … we are committed to taking this to the next step,” he said. ​“I just can’t responsibly say for certain that that can happen. What I can say is we are continuously evaluating opportunities to grow the business.”

State officials and industry experts, though, say the local economics of ​“mine to mill” steel are too compelling to overlook. The Iron Range has a capable union workforce, ample renewable-energy potential to power cost-effective hydrogen and electrochemical iron production, an applied research powerhouse backed by the University of Minnesota, and a potential clean energy bonanza trapped in its bedrock. If it’s going to happen anywhere, why not here?

Visible on geologic maps as a 110-mile narrow ribbon of iron-rich bedrock north of Lake Superior, the Mesabi Range is the legacy of what may have been Earth’s first great extinction event.

Oxygen-exhaling microorganisms first emerged around 2.4 billion years ago. Over the next 400 million years, the atmosphere’s methane content fell dramatically, precipitating a global ice age and relegating once-dominant anaerobic life-forms to oxygen-poor environments like the deep ocean. 

The Great Oxidation Event also pulled vast quantities of dissolved iron out of the sea and scattered huge formations of ferrous rock throughout the Earth’s crust. In a few lucky places around the world — including northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan — these deposits sit close enough to the surface for humans to exploit with relative ease. 

The Mesabi Range is the largest of Minnesota’s three major iron ranges and the only one actively mined today. Most non-geologists refer to it as the Iron Range, or just ​“the Range.” Historically, it has produced upwards of 70% of U.S. iron.

It’s a place of stark beauty hewn by nearly two centuries of human meddling. The dense forests of birch, pine, and spruce are largely secondary growth, a dim echo of the towering white pines clear-cut in the late 19th century. The deepest, clearest lakes, some rimmed by sheer cliffs, are long-abandoned mine pits reclaimed by groundwater. The pretty, rust-colored buttes along Highway 169 west of Hibbing are piles of waste rock and low-grade ore. Twentieth-century miners pushed them out of the way to get at the good stuff.

The Mesabi Range’s first iron mine opened in 1890, followed two years later by a railroad to the port of Superior, Wisconsin. Minnesota iron could now reach the burgeoning steel mills of the lower Great Lakes by ship — still the most cost-effective way to transport heavy cargo.

Ten years later, more than 100 mines were operating along the formation. Settlements quickly sprang up along the richest veins, with some, like Hibbing and Virginia, emerging as proper boomtowns. Around the same time, the industrialists John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Oliver consolidated ore mining, processing, transportation, and steelmaking operations into U.S. Steel, the country’s first billion-dollar corporation.

“Within 20 years, this place transformed from logged-out nothing into a vibrant industrial zone,” said Aaron Brown, a local historian and newspaper columnist.

As Iron Range mining expanded, it drew workers from other parts of the United States and from Europe. Over coffee at Wizard’s Sports Bar and Grill in Nashwauk, Brown said mine work was brutal at first, but a multi-decade push for living wages and union representation paid off. During the first half of the 20th century, the Iron Range and surrounding towns flourished. Iron money built architectural marvels like Hibbing High School — Bob Dylan’s alma mater — and seeded a network of postsecondary institutions that remains ​“one of the best things we have going for us,” said Ida Rukavina, the state commissioner who oversees economic development efforts across northeastern Minnesota.

Gradually, though, high-grade natural ore deposits were depleted. In the 1950s, University of Minnesota scientists raced to develop an economical process for pelletizing taconite, a more plentiful but lower-quality soft ore that requires additional processing before it can be shipped and fed into steel furnaces. They succeeded, staving off an extinction-level event for the region’s mines. 

But that very success contributed to the region’s eventual downturn. While benefiting the steel companies themselves, the shift to taconite and a host of other technological advances from the 1960s onward led to a steady reduction in the number of workers needed to run the plants. 

As the 20th century wore on, the iron industry began shifting to Australia, Brazil, India, and other countries with cheaper production costs due to some combination of higher-quality reserves, looser environmental regulations, and government subsidies. The rise of recycled steelmaking in the U.S. also reduced demand for domestic ore. 

The story of the Iron Range over the last 50 years, then, has been one of economic decline.

Nowadays, the Iron Range is dotted with rusting factories. Some once-bustling downtowns have more empty storefronts than occupied ones. Hibbing, the commercial center of the western Iron Range, has lost around a quarter of its population since 1980. 

The Range currently has just five active iron mines. As of last August, when there were six, the combined annual production capacity of all U.S. iron mines was 48.9 million tons, according to Global Energy Monitor. That’s paltry in comparison with China’s 470 million tons, India’s 500.8 million tons, and Brazil’s 591.8 million tons. It’s a rounding error next to Australia’s 1.2 billion tons.

Cleveland-Cliffs, a big producer of automotive steel, has furloughed more than 600 workers at its Minorca and Hibbing Taconite mines in the last year and a half — over 10% of the industry’s local workforce. Minorca is completely shut down, while HibTac has idled two of its three pellet-production lines as its crude ore supply dwindles.

Brown and other locals say it’s an open question whether Cliffs, as most around here call it, will ever reopen Minorca. A Cliffs spokesperson did not respond to voicemails seeking an interview or comment.

John Arbogast, a blunt-talking, Range-based United Steelworkers union representative, said his industry — like so many others — is at the mercy of forces even the bosses can’t control. Slow auto sales are one reason why Cliffs and other producers are sitting on ​“a glut of pellets,” he said.

“The price of cars went up during Covid and hasn’t come down,” Arbogast said. ​“Really, you’re gonna pay $90,000 for a new pickup? It’s all part of the whole mess going on in this country, and we’re affected by it.” 

Despite its problems, the taconite industry is still the largest employer offering unionized, family-sustaining jobs on the Iron Range. For furloughed Minorca and HibTac workers, most of whom rolled off the unemployment dole this spring, Arbogast said it’s basically the only option.

“When a company closes in the [Twin Cities] metro, there’s other places you can look for a job. Here, it’s basically mining, tourism, and a little bit of lumber,” he said. 

Political and business leaders have long talked up the need to diversify northeastern Minnesota’s economy away from extractive industries like taconite and forestry. But that’s easier said than done. While tourism has room to grow, seasonal employers can’t match the six-figure salaries (with benefits) nor the millions in taxes the steel companies pay every year. It’s unclear whether a controversial Google data center proposed near Duluth is an outlier or the start of a digital gold rush. Also uncertain is whether the trickle of remote workers who’ve moved north since Covid — drawn by the natural beauty and ​“slower pace of life,” Rukavina said — will be enough to reverse years of demographic decline. 

The upshot is that most everyone who cares about the future of the Iron Range eagerly awaits Mesabi Metallics’ opening. That’s certainly true of Rep. Spencer Igo, a Republican who represents the western Iron Range in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

“I remember hearing as a kid that we were going to be mining iron and making hot-rolled steel 10 minutes from the family cabin,” Igo said in a February interview at his St. Paul office. He turned 30 in March.

Mesabi Metallics will need over 350 permanent employees, and locals expect it to snap up furloughed Minorca and HibTac workers. Arbogast said it’s poaching first-rate managers working elsewhere on the Range.

“They’re paying a heck of a lot more, throwing a lot of money around,” he said. 

The mine will deploy cutting-edge technologies to turn taconite into iron while using less energy.

“We’ve learned a lot about mining over the last 50 years, and we’ve applied it here,” Larry Sutherland, Mesabi Metallics’ president and COO, told me during my February visit.

On my tour of the mine, Sutherland — who’s celebrating his 51st year in the iron business — showed off North America’s first electrified-hydraulic-shovel, diesel-electric haul trucks, whose 400-ton carrying capacity nearly doubles the industry standard, and a bevy of stationary processing equipment that in days past would have run on diesel. After digging begins in earnest, Mesabi Metallics may add overhead trolley lines that zip the haul trucks up the steep pit roads in all-electric mode, significantly reducing diesel consumption.

But Mesabi Metallics won’t single-handedly solve the region’s employment problems. 

Three hundred fifty union jobs is nothing to sneeze at, but Iron Range mining will remain more than 300 good positions short unless and until Cliffs calls workers back to Minorca and HibTac. And that may not happen without a pickup in U.S. automotive sales or building construction.

Longer term, state and local officials hope to expand northeastern Minnesota’s mining industry beyond iron. The region has rich deposits of copper, nickel, cobalt, and possibly helium, a scarce and valuable industrial gas. Each of these resources is a critical input for batteries, electric motors, and other drivers of the clean energy transition.

All this is taking place against the backdrop of a transition within the domestic steel industry itself to lower-carbon production, albeit one that’s happening slowly and with less help from President Donald Trump than from former President Joe Biden. 

Most of the steel produced since the Industrial Revolution has come out of blast furnaces — which use coal as fuel and also as a type of additive to remove oxygen and other impurities from iron ore — and basic oxygen furnaces. This two-furnace combination is responsible for nearly half the 2.2 tons of carbon dioxide emitted per ton of finished steel produced worldwide, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs still make what’s called primary steel this way at massive integrated mills across the lower Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, but about 70% of the steel produced in the U.S. these days is recycled: Scraps of the metal are combined with purified iron and then melted down in an electric arc furnace, or EAF. Supplemental materials like lime and coal are added to create fresh steel. 

Since they run on electricity, EAFs create far fewer emissions than traditional furnaces. The catch is that they’re not as good as basic oxygen furnaces at removing impurities in iron. This means their steel — at least right now — is not suitable for manufacturing products that require high-quality stuff, such as automobiles. 

So, EAFs are little used in primary steelmaking. To change that — and make real progress on decarbonizing the U.S. steel industry — steelmakers will need to replace blast furnaces with technologies capable of producing higher-grade iron to feed EAFs.

The front-runner for this is direct reduction, a generic term for processes that react iron ore with a ​“reducing” gas like methane or hydrogen at comparatively low temperatures; the resulting iron is known as direct reduced iron, or DRI. To work effectively, DRI furnaces need that DR-grade feedstock, like the pellets Mesabi Metallics will produce, which will be about 68% pure iron.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says pairing direct reduction fueled by natural gas with EAFs emits 1.4 tons of CO₂ on average per ton of finished steel, nearly 40% less than the conventional blast furnace and basic oxygen combo.

When the reducing gas is hydrogen made from natural gas with carbon capture or renewable electricity, reduction itself emits little or no carbon.

The United States has a few direct-reduction facilities already. Cliffs operates one in Toledo, Ohio. North Carolina–based Nucor and Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal each have their own on the Gulf Coast. 

More DRI plants are on the way. The massive steel mill that Hyundai is building in Louisiana will have a DRI component when it powers up in 2029. In April, U.S. Steel announced plans to build a DRI plant at an existing steel mill in Arkansas. 

However, while these facilities matter to their host communities and the steel industry’s broader effort to clean up its operations, Cliffs’ Toledo facility is the only one using Iron Range pellets today. Most others source, or plan to source, high-grade iron from abroad.

The Hyundai facility will import 3.6 million tons of iron ore each year, Louisiana’s economic development authority says. It’ll follow the example set by other Gulfside DRI plants, said Elizabeth Boatman, the Minnesota-based lead on decarbonization for 5 Lakes Energy, a think tank specializing in clean energy policy in the Great Lakes region.

“That is not American ore,” Boatman said. Southern mills’ import dependence was apparently a factor in Trump’s decision to exempt Brazilian ore and pig iron from 50% import duties last summer. 

For now, most American ore supports aging blast furnaces in the southern Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley. Both U.S. Steel and Cliffs have said they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to squeeze about 20 more years of life out from their coal-fed facilities. In a move widely seen as a concession to the coal-friendly Trump administration, Cliffs’ decision came at the expense of a previously announced plan to replace its blast furnace in Middletown, Ohio, with a hydrogen-ready DRI plant.

Arbogast said his union members welcome the big steelmakers’ commitments to keep aging blast furnaces now fed by Minnesota taconite in good working order. They also know those facilities are living on borrowed time.

“The blast furnaces are getting older, and they’re never going to build a new one,” he said. ​“Electric arc furnaces are the inevitable method of making steel.”

Such a future would be good news for Mesabi Metallics, U.S. Steel’s Keetac, Cliffs’ Northshore Mining, and other DR-grade pellet plants planned for the Iron Range. As the outlines of a longer-term shift to integrated, low-carbon steelmaking come into focus, the region as a whole stands to benefit.

Once operational, U.S. Steel’s Arkansas DRI furnace will join Cliffs’ Toledo facility as a major customer for Iron Range pellets. Company spokesperson Andrew Fulton said in an email that planning is ​“in the very early stages” but confirmed the plant will use ore from Keetac, just up the road from Mesabi Metallics. 

Along with the legacy steelmakers, at least two other companies are looking to turn Iron Range ore into DRI elsewhere in the United States.

One of them is Scranton Holding Co., a nascent mining and ironmaking startup run by Jim Bougalis, an Iron Range entrepreneur.

Scranton Holding has two subsidiaries: Calumet Reclamation and North American Iron. Neither responded to my interview requests, but the companies have detailed websites, and Bougalis has spoken openly about his vision with economic development officials and other media outlets. 

Calumet says it wants to recover millions of tons of ore from 20th-century stockpiles near Nashwauk and ship the material 500 miles west to a $2 billion DRI plant North American Iron is developing near Minot, North Dakota. Calumet says its Iron Range site, a former state park, has at least 15 years’ worth of ore supply.

According to a grant application submitted to the North Dakota Industrial Commission in 2023, North American Iron would use a hydrogen-based iron purification process developed by Tenova, a multinational metallurgy company that touts its ​“sustainable, innovative and reliable solutions.” In an October interview with Minot-area media outlet The Dakotan, Bougalis likened the process to a ​“microwave” that reacts hydrogen and iron without combustion.

Mark Lyman, economic development specialist with the Minot Area Chamber Economic Development Corporation, said in the same interview that North American Iron would use ​“stranded” methane from the nearby Bakken shale formation. A new 80-mile pipeline would collect the gas and transport it eastward to Minot. The reactions in North American Iron’s ​“microwave” would produce carbon dioxide that can be captured and sequestered in bedrock ideal for long-term carbon storage — or used to pull more oil out of the Bakken. 

Another Iron Range entrepreneur, Larry Lehtinen, has a similar vision for a separate stockpile complex about 20 minutes west of Calumet’s proposed operation. 

Lehtinen’s company, MagIron, is a leaner successor to his previous venture Magnetation, which employed hundreds of workers across several facilities in Minnesota and Indiana before going belly up in 2015 amid a global commodities downturn. 

Magnetation’s Indiana facility used Minnesota ore to produce lower-purity iron pellets that fed traditional blast furnaces operated by AK Steel, a formerly independent steelmaker now owned by Cliffs. MagIron’s approach reflects where the industry is headed: It plans to restart an ore concentrator on the Iron Range and modify the Indiana plant to make DR-grade pellets for EAFs. MagIron says it could eventually add a DRI plant in Indiana, too. Testing late last year provided ​“critical validation” of MagIron’s reserves and pelletizing process, Lehtinen said at the time. The company says its current mineral leases offer 40 years of ore supply. 

Lehtinen did not respond to requests for comment or an interview. Brown, the Iron Range historian, said the industry’s boom-and-bust nature makes at least some of the people behind new ore mining and processing proposals reluctant to speak about them in the press. With iron and steel prices trending downward, even the big steelmakers are nervous, he added.

On the other hand, Brown noted, there’s industry consensus that ​“the market for DR pellets has nowhere to go but up.” In a feasibility study published earlier this year, MagIron said the DR-grade pellet market could grow 13% annually through 2034. Mesabi Metallics, meanwhile, is in line for up to $10 billion in financing from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to support international sales.

Other, newer technologies for producing DR-grade iron could emerge on the Iron Range as well.

DRI is already economical today. But Rolf Weberg, executive director of the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute, told me that there’s much room for improvement.

“The way they do it now, they put a basket of pellets in the top [of the furnace] and hope they come out the bottom,” he said.

NRRI is a state-chartered research institution with three hubs in northern Minnesota. I visited its Iron Range outpost in the former mining town of Coleraine, some 20 miles down the road from Mesabi Metallics. 

There, NRRI is commissioning a first-of-its-kind DRI simulator that can mimic the conditions found in full-size industrial furnaces. Weberg said the machine’s digital modeling capabilities would mark a dramatic leap forward in low-carbon ironmaking research.

It’s just one of around 200 projects underway at NRRI. The institute has dozens of scientists and technicians working to ​“de-risk” new and/​or improved materials, processes, and equipment for commercial clients, including steelmakers.

Weberg and Jamie Alexander, NRRI’s director of external affairs, display infectious enthusiasm for innovations such as a ceramic ore grinder that Weberg said would boost processing efficiency at taconite plants. While Alexander noted that they couldn’t ​“speak to what clients will see in the field,” an efficiency improvement of any percent ​“is huge in a production setting as it is the largest operating cost.”

NRRI supports the forestry and agriculture sectors, too, and its domains sometimes overlap. In a century-old maintenance shed for railcars in Coleraine, NRRI staff are working to scale production of a dense form of biochar that could one day sub for supplemental coal in EAFs — making DRI-based steel production even cleaner. Weberg said an NRRI-developed poplar hybrid that can grow 10 feet a year could serve as a regenerative, lower-carbon raw material for the biochar.

All this progress leaves the higher-ups at Mesabi Metallics feeling that the wind is at their backs.

“At this location, we have the opportunity to truly do something unique: to vertically integrate modern steelmaking processes, which will allow us to be the cleanest steel producer in the world [and] one of the lowest-cost producers of steel in the world,” Broking said.

Such a play would align Mesabi Metallics with U.S. Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs, and other global steelmakers like ArcelorMittal. These companies operate sprawling mills that refine iron and a host of finished steel products all in one place. 

Historically, steelmakers have sited those mills closer to where they or their suppliers dug coal out of the ground. But as blast furnaces go the way of the steam locomotive, 5 Lakes Energy’s Boatman said it makes more sense to produce purified iron — and maybe even finished steel — closer to the iron mines. The calculus is especially important for the Iron Range operations planning to mine waste piles or tailings, which tend to have lower iron content and require additional work to concentrate, she added.

“One of the push points to moving [purified] iron production here is that around one-third of the pellet is not iron,” Boatman said. ​“Why would you want to pay for fuel and time to ship non-iron when you could just ship the iron itself?”

It would be a return to form for northeastern Minnesota. U.S. Steel ran a blast furnace at its 1,500-acre Duluth Works from the late 1910s to the early 1970s and continued finished steelmaking there until the late 1980s. Employment peaked around 3,500 and annual output north of 900,000 tons, according to a Mesabi Tribune retrospective published in 2020. 

Virtually nothing remains today. The site, a 1,500-acre brownfield just inland from a deepwater port that handles millions of tons of Iron Range pellets every year, would be a natural choice for a DRI-based steelmaking facility. In theory, it could host renewable energy facilities to enable large-scale hydrogen production, which would require hundreds of megawatts of clean power to supply a fully decarbonized shaft furnace. 

Boatman said the idea of a DRI plant in Duluth has been studied, but any firm plans remain years off. As for what Rep. Igo enthusiastically calls the ​“dream” of integrated, DRI-based steelmaking on the Iron Range itself, the $800 million investment U.S. Steel recently said it would make in its existing Minnesota operations is too little to cover the multibillion-dollar cost of an integrated steel plant. And Mesabi Metallics would need to complete additional permitting to get permission to move forward at its own site, Boatman said. Meanwhile, local media outlet Iron Range Today reported on Feb. 24 that Mesabi Metallics is eyeing a potential DRI facility in Kentucky, citing job postings, public filings, and legislative lobbying activity. As of mid-July, the job-posting website ZipRecruiter showed about 20 active listings from Mesabi Metallics there, some mentioning ​“our DRI and Integrated Steel Plant.”

Broking reiterated Mesabi Metallics’ position that it would begin using hydrogen in its pelletization plant first — as soon as economically feasible. It won’t happen tomorrow, though.

“We should be studying these things,” he said. ​“But in terms of when that could happen or how it could happen … [We’ll] wait and see.”

State economic development officials and the steel industry itself had high hopes for green hydrogen, the kind produced with 100% renewable power, said Pete Wyckoff, who was deputy commissioner of energy resources for the Minnesota Department of Commerce when I interviewed him earlier this year. In May, he joined the clean energy nonprofit Evergreen Action as vice president of policy. 

Since then, persistently high costs for hydrogen electrolyzers, rising power prices, the Trump administration’s suspension or cancellation of billions in hydrogen hub funding, and Washington Republicans’ partial repeal of federal tax credits for the fuel have worsened already-challenging green hydrogen economics. It doesn’t help when deep-pocketed data center companies compete for the same grid interconnections as price-sensitive hydrogen developers, Wyckoff said. 

“Everyone is looking at it now with slightly cut-back expectations. … I’m skeptical about the turn to hydrogen happening right away,” Wyckoff said. 

Unless. Wyckoff and several others interviewed for this story expressed varying degrees of optimism about the possibility of geologic hydrogen extraction in northern Minnesota. If present and recoverable in sufficient quantities at or near DRI plants, naturally occurring or stimulated hydrogen reserves would solve the vexing problems of transportation and storage. The economics of hydrogen production would almost certainly improve, and with them the economics of ultralow-carbon steel. 

At least three companies have asked the state for exploratory drilling permits, including the buzzy Colorado startup Koloma.

“It might not look exactly as we imagine it, but there’s a ​‘there’ there,” Wyckoff said.

Igo agrees. He’s the lead author on a bill that would give NRRI $650,000 to investigate Minnesota’s geologic hydrogen potential over the next two years. Minnesota lawmakers are separately working on gas drilling regulations that would govern hydrogen and helium extraction — a novel concept in a state with no significant oil or natural gas reserves.

“If we find this stuff near a taconite mine — wow,” Igo said, ​“Minnesota will be the epicenter of the iron industry.”