China has begun operations at what is described as the world’s largest iron ore magnetisation roasting project, using a new industrial process to convert low grade iron ore and discarded mine tailings into high grade iron concentrate.
The facility in Anshan, Liaoning province, has passed official acceptance tests and is operating at full capacity, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Developed by researchers at CAS’s Institute of Process Engineering, the plant can process about 5.56 million tonnes of refractory iron ore and mine tailings annually.
The technology can upgrade material containing as little as 11 per cent iron into concentrate with an iron grade of about 65 per cent. Researchers say it is the first industrial scale technology capable of processing iron tailings with such a low iron content.
The development could help China make greater use of its domestic iron resources and reduce its dependence on imported ore. China is the world’s largest iron ore consumer and relies on overseas suppliers for more than 80 per cent of its requirements despite having the world’s fourth largest iron ore reserves.
A major challenge is that much of China domestic iron ore is low grade and difficult to process economically using conventional methods. The new system uses fluidised bed magnetising roasting to change the magnetic properties of iron minerals before they are separated from waste.
Conventional magnetic separation becomes less effective when iron concentrations are extremely low or when the minerals have weak magnetic properties. The new process is designed to overcome this limitation by controlling the roasting conditions and the amount of time particles remain inside the reactor.
According to CAS, the technology achieved an iron mineral conversion rate of 98 per cent while consuming about 0.82 gigajoules of energy per tonne of ore. This represents roughly a 35 per cent reduction in energy consumption compared with existing technologies, according to the researchers.
The project is the result of decades of research into magnetising roasting. Early work on the approach dates back to the 1950s and 1960s. Professor Zhu Qingshan revived efforts to commercialise the technology in 2004 and spent more than two decades developing and refining the process.
Construction of the Anshan facility began in March 2024. Full process testing was carried out in September 2025, and the plant officially entered operation in January 2026. It has three production lines, each capable of processing about 1.85 million tonnes of material annually.
The facility forms part of state owned Ansteel Group’s wider plan to reprocess about 24 million tonnes of iron tailings every year.
The potential resource is considerably larger. The research team estimates that the technology could make it possible to process nearly 30 billion tonnes of difficult to process iron ore and almost 10 billion tonnes of iron bearing tailings across China.
The technology has already been licensed for projects with a combined annual processing capacity of more than 15 million tonnes.
By recovering iron from material previously considered difficult or uneconomical to process, the technology could reduce waste from mining while increasing the supply of domestically produced iron concentrate. Its broader impact will depend on how efficiently the process can be scaled across China’s large reserves of low grade ore and accumulated mine tailings.