Midrex Technologies, Inc.

Midrex Technologies, Inc. is a Charlotte, North Carolina process technology firm that licenses and engineers the MIDREX direct reduction ironmaking process, the most widely used route for producing direct reduced iron outside the blast furnace. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kobe Steel and runs a research facility in Pineville, North Carolina alongside offices in London, Gurgaon, Shanghai and Dubai. Its process variants include MIDREX Flex, MIDREX H2, MxCol and HOTLINK, aimed at plants transitioning from natural gas to hydrogen. Midrex supplies the direct reduction technology for thyssenkrupp’s tkH2Steel plant at Duisburg, a 2.5-million-tonne facility being built inside an operating integrated steelworks, and supplied the voestalpine hot briquetted iron plant at Corpus Christi, Texas. The firm is ISO 9001:2015 certified.

Midrex does not build plants in the conventional contracting sense. It designs the process, licenses it, supplies the equipment package and then stays attached to the asset for its operating life. The company traces that work to 1969 and frames its role as covering the full plant lifecycle: design, supply, enhancement, maintenance and operations support.

Each office in the network has a defined job rather than being a general sales outpost. Charlotte holds global sales, engineering and technical services. A separate research and technology development center sits at Pineville, North Carolina, running process test work and labs. Midrex UK in London specialises in sourcing and arranging project financing. The Gurgaon entity handles Indian project sales and engineering support, Shanghai covers projects in China, and the Dubai company provides aftermarket support across the Middle East and North Africa. A logistics arm operates alongside the Charlotte headquarters.

The aftermarket business is a named practice, Midrex Global Solutions, run out of Charlotte and Dubai. Its work is unglamorous and specific: cutting water-system fouling and scaling so annual cleaning downtime drops, raising metallisation and adjusting carbon content, predictive maintenance on installed equipment, operator and maintenance training, and supply of guaranteed OEM parts.

How the technology got here

The process began as an idea from Donald Beggs at Surface Combustion’s R&D group in the 1960s, first running commercially at Oregon Steel Mills in Portland. The Korf Group bought the process and set up Midrex Corporation in Charlotte in the 1970s; Kobe Steel acquired the assets in the 1980s. Milestones since then read as a steady climb in scale: furnace capacity to one million tonnes a year, the first hot briquetted iron plant, hot transport and hot charging into electric arc furnaces, oxygen injection, cumulative production past one billion tonnes.

Delivery today is consortium-based. Paul Wurth, part of SMS group, partnered on the Tosyali Algerie modules in Oran, where Module 2 produced 2.43 million tons in 2025 and set a world record for a single direct reduction module in its first year of operation. In June 2026 U.S. Steel selected Midrex for a 2.5 million tonne per year HDRI/HBI plant at Big River Steel Works in Osceola, Arkansas, with first production targeted for 2029.

The company states a plain purpose alongside the engineering: to love and serve others, which it describes as putting people first in an industry it is trying to decarbonise.