Helix Carbon Says Recycling Blast Furnace Fumes Cuts Iron Costs by $14 a Ton

Helix Carbon says iron producers can save $14 per ton of iron by recycling their own blast furnace pollution — and cut coke use by a third in the process.

The startup, which pitched live on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Tuesday as part of the Startup Battlefield competition, takes a contrarian view of steel decarbonization. Most startups in the space are building new ways to make metal. Helix wants to clean up the furnaces the industry already runs.

"Any attempt to decarbonize the steel industry without dealing with the blast furnace is not going to work," David Brown, Helix Carbon's co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

How does the process actually work?

Blast furnaces have made iron for centuries. They burn coke — a processed form of coal — to generate heat, while carbon monoxide from that combustion strips oxygen atoms off raw iron ore, reducing it to metallic iron. The reaction dumps enormous amounts of CO2 straight into the atmosphere.

Helix Carbon's fix is an electrolyzer that uses electricity and a catalyst to break an oxygen atom off that waste CO2, converting it into carbon monoxide. The CO then gets injected back into the furnace, where it does the same reducing work as coke-derived gas. Less coke needed, less CO2 vented.

Electrolyzers aren't new. The difference, Brown said, is that Helix's design can handle the entire raw exhaust stream from a blast furnace. Conventional electrolyzers are too delicate for that — they only run on purified, concentrated CO2, which means exhaust has to be cleaned up first. Helix skips that step.

What does this change for iron producers?

Coke savings are the headline, but the exact number is contested. Brown said some scientific papers suggest up to 90% of coke could be eliminated; other studies put the figure at 30% to 40%.

Helix is proposing a conservative starting point: replace 33% of coke. At that level, the company says its technology saves producers $14 per ton of iron.

"That may not seem like a lot, but margins in the iron industry are famously thin," Brown said.

For an industry where single-digit cost shifts move the needle, that's real money. And it reframes emissions tech from a compliance expense into a margin play — a rare win-win for a process this dirty.

Why steel won't come first

The iron and steel industries form a combined $2 trillion market, according to Grand View Research. That's an appealing target for a young startup, but the sector moves slowly, in part because its equipment lasts so long.

"There are blast furnaces that have lived for over 100 years," Brown said.

So Helix plans to court the specialty chemicals industry first to bring in revenue earlier. Its electrolyzer can make chemicals directly from waste streams, without a carbon capture step.

"We don't need to capture the CO2 first," Brown said. "We just utilize it, and that opens up the door of making chemicals on site right out of waste streams."

That chemicals-first path could fund the slower, harder sales cycle in steel. If the coke-replacement economics hold up at industrial scale, Helix's bet is that retrofitting beats replacing — in an industry where furnaces outlive the companies that build them.