Formerly A2Z Smelter Services · Est. 2019, Malaysia · South Africa since 2022

Shaft-furnace technology for ferroalloy production.

Livingston Minerals has developed a carbothermic, two-stage shaft-furnace process for the production of high-carbon ferromanganese. The process replaces the submerged-arc furnace and its multi-megawatt grid connection; electrical demand is limited to fans, controls and auxiliaries. Technical feasibility was demonstrated in 2024.

The technology Consulting services

30+years in Si, Al, Cr & Mn alloys

2024FeMn feasibility proven without a SAF

4pilot campaigns completed

12+countries of consulting experience

<5%of a SAF's electrical demand

The technology

A shaft furnace for ferromanganese

Conventional ferromanganese is smelted in a submerged-arc furnace: a 15–30 MVA electrical installation dependent on grid availability, connection lead-times and tariff escalation. Livingston Minerals replaces the arc with carbon — the same reductant the process consumes anyway — in a two-stage counter-current shaft arrangement.

Stage one — pre-reduction. Ore and reductant, agglomerated into briquettes, descend through a shaft heated by the rising furnace gas. The gas is deliberately kept rich in carbon monoxide, so the higher manganese oxides are reduced by the gas itself — a reaction that releases heat inside the burden, warming it from within. Moisture, carbonates and the most oxygen-hungry work are done here, cheaply.

Stage two — smelting. The hot, pre-reduced burden descends directly into a coke-bed smelting furnace, where hot-blast combustion of carbon supplies the final reduction and melting duty. Slag and metal trickle through a deep coke bed with generous residence time before tapping. The furnace gas — still hot, still fuel-rich — rises straight into stage one and does its second job.

The principle of the arrangement is that the energy in the reductant is used twice, as in a blast furnace. Electrical demand is limited to fans, controls and auxiliaries, and the plant operates from a standard industrial connection of a few hundred kilovolt-amperes rather than a dedicated multi-megavolt-ampere grid supply.

The two-stage counter-current concept: one carbon purchase, its energy harvested twice.

SUBMERGED-ARC ROUTE

Energy: grid electricity, 15–30 MVA connection
Grid lead-time: years, and rising in most jurisdictions
Exposure: tariff escalation, load curtailment, outages
Capex: furnace + transformers + HV yard + grid works
Scale: only economic large

LIVINGSTON SHAFT ROUTE

Energy: carbon already in the recipe; electricity <5% of SAF demand
Grid lead-time: a standard industrial connection
Exposure: coke and ore markets — hedgeable commodities
Capex: steel shell, refractory, blower, gas handling
Scale: economic small; modular growth

Basis of estimates. Detailed engineering and costed mass-and-energy balances indicate a capital cost of the order of one-third to one-half of an equivalent-capacity submerged-arc installation before grid-connection works are even counted, and a cost of production advantage of the order of 10–20% against a comparable SAF operation. Both figures move with geography — electricity and coke prices, ore logistics and labour differ by country — The advantage is greatest where electrical power is expensive, unreliable or slow to connect. Site-specific figures are prepared under NDA. Extension of the process to chrome alloys is in development with an established furnace-technology partner. The pre-reduction stage on its own has already been adopted by a ferroalloy producer for industrial testing ahead of an existing submerged-arc furnace.

Proven in the field

Trial programme and design development

Technical feasibility was demonstrated in early 2024 at the Ekandustria pilot facility, on equipment designed and built in-house. The design issues identified during the programme, and the engineering responses to them, are recorded below; each is now embedded as a permanent check in the design models.

First hot trial — **Hot commissioning**Early hot commissioning at the Ekandustria pilot plant.

Briquetting plant — **Agglomeration**In-house briquetting line turning ore and reductant fines into charge.

Ore-carbon briquettes — **Composite briquettes**Ore and reductant agglomerated into a single charge body.

Pilot shaft furnace tower — **The pilot shaft tower**As campaigned in late 2024.

Control system — **Control**PLC-driven charging, blast and temperature control on the pilot.

Temperature logging — **Instrumentation**Campaign data is logged and reconciled against the process models.

Tapping hot metal — **Tapping**Hot metal tapped to the ladle during a pilot campaign.

Off-gas plant — **Gas handling**Off-gas and dust management on the pilot installation.

Ore microscopy — **Ore characterisation**Microscopy of ore samples informs briquette formulation.

Products demonstrated. Three product routes have been demonstrated in metal. HC FeMn by the shaft route — the flagship. Ultra-low-carbon FeMn by an aluminothermic route, produced at a purpose-built facility at a sustained 50 tonnes per month. And a high-manganese synthetic slag campaign that turned a discounted high-iron manganese ore into two saleable products at once: a clean ~92% Fe pig iron, and a fluid ~35% Mn slag with under 1% iron — a feedstock richer than most natural ores, XRF-verified. See the analyses in the gallery →

Lessons learned — and engineered out

Pre-reduction atmosphere

An early design heated the pre-reduction stage with a burner. Review against first-principles thermodynamics showed that the key reduction reactions do not proceed in an oxidising atmosphere. Resolutionthe fuel-rich furnace gas is now passed through the burden and performs the reduction directly. Because the reaction is exothermic within the briquette, the revised arrangement is both simpler and more energy-efficient than the original.

Gas routing

The first gas circuit combusted furnace gas in a separate chamber and returned it to the top of the shaft, co-current with the descending burden, which limited the heat exchange. Resolutionthe gas now passes directly up through both stages in counter-current flow. The revision eliminated a combustion chamber, a recirculation loop and the associated ducting from the flowsheet.

Gas velocity and vessel sizing

The revised gas path raised the off-gas temperature substantially, increasing actual volumetric flow. A design review identified vessel sections in which gas velocity would have exceeded the fines-entrainment limit. Resolutionthe affected sections were resized against a validated velocity criterion before construction; the check is now applied to every design revision.

Model validation discipline

One in-house flow model failed validation against established free-jet correlations and was discarded and replaced. A subsequent mesh-sensitivity result was withdrawn when the numerical spread exceeded the effect being measured. Standing practiceevery model must reproduce an established reference result before its predictions are accepted, and results that cannot be defended are not reported.

Engineering rigour

Process modelling and validation

The design is carried by a fully closed mass-and-energy balance — every stream accounted for, mass closure to within hundredths of a percent — coupled to packed-bed computational fluid dynamics of gas flow and temperature through both furnace stages.

The CFD resolves gas velocity and temperature fields through the burden, raceway behaviour at the tuyeres, and the distribution duty of the internals — validated against Ergun packed-bed resistance and classical jet and heat-exchange correlations before any of its predictions were accepted.

The same discipline extends to economics: the cost model is live-linked to the balance, so every design decision — gas routing, preheat level, vessel geometry — reprices the tonne of alloy the moment it changes. Design revisions that increased the cost of production were reported with the same prominence as those that reduced it.

Contour figures shown at reduced resolution; geometry, dimensions and operating parameters are proprietary.

CFD gas flow and temperature fields — Packed-bed CFD: mid-plane gas velocity (top) and temperature (bottom) fields for alternative tuyere arrangements.

Consulting & services

Consulting services

Alongside its own process development, Livingston Minerals provides consulting services founded on three decades of operating, commissioning and managing smelting operations.

Operational turnaround & efficiency

Furnace efficiency drift diagnosis, metallurgical control, electrode management, and plant observation exercises with prioritised quick wins — the approach that raised one SiMn operation's output by 60% over five years without expansion capital.

Mass & energy balance modelling

Live, auditable furnace models linked to management accounts: theoretical-versus-actual reconciliation, recipe optimisation for lowest cost of production, and scenario planning for distressed operations.

Due diligence & feasibility

Technical due diligence for acquisitions and lenders across Mn, Cr and Cu assets in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia; feasibility and opportunity identification studies.

Small-scale trials & pilot campaigns

Design, build and execution of trial campaigns on site or at a partner facility: sintering, briquetting, direct reduction, smelting trials from 12 kg to industrial scale — with full analytical programmes.

Process development

Development programmes for clients: ULC FeMn production (a 50 t/month facility designed, built and operated), aluminothermic trials, insulation products from baghouse dust, gold recovery from spent carbon, Cu smelting.

Furnace control & AI readiness

Instrumentation audits and data-driven furnace control roadmaps — turning existing PLC/SCADA data into early-warning and efficiency tools.

South AfricaZimbabweZambia KazakhstanRussiaIndia Saudi ArabiaUAEMalaysia UzbekistanVietnamSenegal

About

From A2Z Smelter Services to Livingston Minerals

A to Z Smelter Services was founded in 2019 by Hilgard Rademeyer (B.Ing Metallurgy, University of Pretoria; MBL, Unisa) with a single objective: develop ferroalloy production processes that do not depend on electrical energy. The company began in Malaysia — where insulation products from FeSi baghouse dust, the first small shaft-furnace melting tests, aluminothermic low-carbon FeMn and the briquetting practice were all developed — and relocated to South Africa in 2022, establishing its facility at Ekandustria. It now operates as Livingston Minerals, combining the development programme with a consulting practice. The programme is privately funded by the founder together with a small group of investors drawn from the South African steel, ferroalloy and mining industries, and was approved for seed funding by South Africa's Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) — the funding agreement was signed in January 2024 after the agency's technical review.

Hilgard's career spans silicon, aluminium, chrome and manganese alloys from engineer-in-training to CEO: General Manager and later Executive Director of a major South African SiMn producer — where a business re-engineering programme raised output from 120 kt to ±192 kt per year with no expansion capex — CEO of a ferrochrome smelter recommissioned six weeks ahead of schedule and below budget, and General Manager of a Mn-alloy and FeSi smelter in Malaysia that set production records in eight of his twelve months.

First participant in Eskom's energy buy-back programme (2011–12)
Initiated and ran the world's first industrial-scale Open Bath Slag trials on FeMn and FeCr
Infacon paper moderator (×3) and technical session chair; speaker at Mining Indaba and Metal Bulletin
Executive director of two smelters; alternate director of a manganese mine

Early test furnaces at the development yard.

Contact Livingston Minerals

Investment enquiries, licensing discussions and consulting engagements. Non-disclosure agreements are available on request.

[email protected]

Tel: +84 393 411 702 · +84 941 878 526
WhatsApp: +84 393 411 702 · +27 72 669 9166