In May, the Trump administration yanked billions of dollars in funding from a series of clean industrial projects meant to chart a new, greener path forward for aging U.S. steel and cement makers.
But it’s not over yet for the nascent sector. The green steel startup Boston Metal just raised $51 million from its investors to fund its plans to start generating low-carbon minerals this year.
The company’s debut plant in Brazil aims to commercialize a technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which uses electricity to remove contaminants out of iron ore. Doing so releases only oxygen, so the process only produces emissions if the electricity powering it is generated with fossil fuels. That’s in stark contrast with the coal-fired blast furnaces that traditionally power steel production, or even the gas-powered ironmaking techniques that look increasingly likely to dominate the industry in the coming years.
Boston Metal’s first facility, located in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, uses the process to extract niobium, a soft, corrosion-resistant metal used as an alloying element in steel production. By test-driving its technology on niobium, Boston Metal aims to develop a minor revenue stream while it works out the kinks in the process it plans to eventually use for steel.
Niobium sells for roughly $50,000 per ton — but the total market worldwide is just about 100,000 tons per year. Steel, by contrast, sells for between $500 and $1,000 per ton, but in a market at the scale of 2 billion tons per year.
Four years after establishing its hub in Brazil, the company now employs 200 workers. It’s scheduled to complete the first phase of construction on its plant in the coming months, and reach full scale by this time next year.
“There’s one core technology and several different markets where it could be deployed in a timely fashion as you scale up,” Adam Rauwerdink, Boston Metal’s senior VP of business development, told Latitude Media. “We identified fairly early on a handful of elements that work well with the technology where we’d also have the opportunity to do smaller, earlier projects that are higher-profit generating.”
Since about 90% of the global supply of niobium comes out of Brazil, it was a natural first place to set up shop. The company is considering locations across Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa for its second and third plants. These later facilities could also generate tantalum, used as a heat-resistant alloy, and tin, which typically serves as a protective coating on finished steel products.
Among the company’s latest financing round — delivered via convertible note, a type of loan that grants investors the right to convert the debt into equity — came primarily from existing funders: mining behemoth BHP Ventures, Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the venture firm Piva Capital, and SiteGround, the parent company of the eponymous web-hosting giant with investments in other energy-related startups. Rauwerdink said this round brought on a new investor, a family office, that declined to be named publicly.
“It is great to see mining companies continue to invest in this type of innovation, and thinking up and down stream about how we build a clean future and clean minerals economy,” Hilary Lewis, the steel director at the decarbonization research group Industrious Labs, told Latitude Media. “It’s an indicator for the whole industry about where clean steel production is going and what that transformation might look like.”
While a Boston Metal demonstration facility for green steel would likely arrive in the U.S. sometime around 2028, Rauwerdink said there’s no guarantee the country will be home to its first commercial-scale plant. The company is looking to regions with steady, clean power grids that “are established or growing very rapidly.”
“It’s Scandinavia, Quebec, the Middle East, Minas Gerais,” he said. “And parts of the U.S.”
With projections now showing that President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will raise electricity and increase outages, some fear Boston Metal’s overseas growth highlights a growing risk for the U.S.: that new green technologies are developed and demonstrated here but commercialized abroad, said Brad Townsend, the Ohio-based vice president of policy and outreach at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
“The project isn’t concerning, but what it could portend about those facilities being located in countries with a more positive environment certainly is,” Townsend told Latitude Media. “I certainly worry about a lot of those new low-carbon manufacturing facilities ending up located in other countries with more supportive policies. It’s no surprise that Brazil is one of those places.”
But Rauwerdink said the Trump administration’s focus on critical minerals “aligns well” with what the company is doing so far.
“The supply of critical minerals, and what you can onshore and the more efficiently you can be with that ability to recover when you take those legacy wastes and convert them, can be quite profitable,” he said. “We’re bringing that technology to market.”
