Minnesota mine owner Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. said Wednesday that it will build a $15 million biofuel plant on the Iron Range to help offset the use of coal in its taconite plants in Eveleth and Silver Bay.
The plant will be built in Orr and employ about 25 workers. Late last year, Cleveland-Cliffs bought Renewafuel, a small, two-year-old subsidiary of Rosemount-based Endres Processing.
At the time of the acquisition, company officials said they might build a Renewafuel plant in Minnesota and expand another in Battle Creek, Mich., to produce taconite-plant fuel.
The biofuel plant in Orr will convert cornstalks, switch grass, oat hulls, soybeans and forest waste into environmentally friendly fuel cubes that burn at 2,300 degrees.
Bill Blake, a Cleveland-Cliffs vice president, said the briquettes are considered carbon neutral, producing 90 percent less sulfur dioxide and 35 percent less particulate matter than burning coal.
The cubes will be blended with coal and burned in furnaces to power the conversion of crushed iron ore into taconite pellets in Cleveland-Cliffs' United Taconite Mine in Eveleth and its Northshore Mining plant in Silver Bay, the company said. Cubes from the Renewafuel plant in Battle Creek will be shipped to the Tilden Mine in Ishpeming, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
While small, the biofuel plant is being celebrated by people living around Orr, who are still reeling from the idling of two Ainsworth Lumber factories in nearby Cook and Grand Rapids.
