The combustion, in the burners, of natural gas, heavy oil and/or pulverized coal results, unfortunately, in the production of very important amounts of CO2. For example, a typical pellet plant producing annually 10 million metric tonnes of pellets emits about one million metric tonnes of CO2; therefore, the total world pellet production of 400 million metric tonnes of pellets corresponds to the production of about 40 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year.

Once the very hot combustion gases have gone through the bed of pellets being fired, they are used to preheat and dry the green oncoming pellets before being released to the atmosphere. The released gas temperature being about 350° C., the process energy efficiency would be of only about 80%.

Furthermore, the combustion gases, which are used to dry the ore pellets, are, in addition to CO2, composed of water vapour which is not an optimal composition as a drying gas.

1,000,000 tonnes of CO2 released annually per induration furnace. That's pretty significant.