Global Manganese-alloys (Mn) are highly linked to the steel sector for key engineering applications in Europe. In 2017, Mn-alloy production was approx. 4 Mio tons, required 12,200 GWh electrical energy and emitted around 14.2 Mio tons of CO2. Therefore, an energy intensive and inherent cross-sectorial value chain that is, nowadays, led by the Asian market demand. PREMA is an ambitious initiative that aims at demonstrating an innovative suite of technologies (involving heat recovery and solar technologic approaches) that allow to pre-treat Mn ores, utilising more efficiently energy and material streams and decreasing direct and indirect CO2 emissions (along with SO2 and NOx). LCA and LCCA methodologies will be implemented from early stages to ensure the technical, economic and environmental viability of the solution across the whole Mn-alloys’ value chain. The vision of PREMA is thus to make the Mn-alloys sector in Europe more flexible, sustainable and attractive. In order to cover the whole value chain, there is a strong presence of South African (SA) partners in the consortium, SA being the top 1 in high quality Mn ores’ extraction and exports worldwide. A win-win situation in order to strengthen the Mn-alloys and steel value chains in Europe. PREMA consortium puts together a total of 11 production facilities spread over Europe and SA among 4 Mn producers, representing an aggregated process capacity of 380 MW (Transalloys in SA, Eramet in France and Norway, Ferroglobe in Norway and Spain and OFZ in Slovakia). The innovative character of the project is brought by major players in R&D across Europe and SA, with the Norwegian organisation SINTEF as coordinator. Last but not least, clustering with other EU initiatives, including other SPIRE projects, will be paid special attention in order to create awareness of the project developments from early stages of the demonstration.

Global alumina production capacity is forecast to grow by 30% over the next ten years. Unfortunately, Europe cannot keep the competition and is highly dependent on imported alumina and bauxite. ENSUREAL project’s main objective is to decrease this dependence and characterise all the streams of the alumina industry in order to valorise them and make the European aluminium industry more competitive at a global scale. In order to do so, ENSUREAL addresses the production of alumina of the aluminium production sector, through the introduction of a new technology (Pedersen process) that improves the process’ yield and its energy and environmental performance. Moreover, ENSUREAL’s consortium proposes a new value chain that takes into account all the streams as valorisable products across the aluminium supply chain and introduces the foundry and the agricultural sector. A call for transparency (no-more-black-boxes) and thus a deeply cross-sectorial initiative. More specifically, ENSUREAL brings together the aluminium sector (Aluminium of Greece), the foundry sector (Odlewnie Polskie S.A., Poland), the agricultural sector (Luvena S.A., Poland) and lime producers (CaO Hellas, Belgium), in order to demonstrate the new technologies and approaches proposed. The innovative character of the project is brought by major players in R&D, such as SINTEF, NTUA and NTNU. Outotec and SMS group bring outstanding engineering and process expertise. Furthermore, 3 SMEs will help define and optimise the bauxite scenario in Europe (AdMiRIS), develop ENSUREAL's business case (ITRB) and study the upscaling of the process for future commercial prospects (KON Chem). Last but not least, clustering with other EU initiatives, including other SPIRE projects, will be paid special attention in order to promote a transparent approach of development that show the aluminium producers in Europe all the benefits of implementing the ENSUREAL process once it is demonstrated.