Metalot

Metalot, at the Future Energy Lab in Budel in the south of Brabant, builds a community around one idea: metals as carriers of clean energy, with iron as a fuel as its best-known example. Iron powder can be burned for heat without emitting CO2. The rust that remains can be turned back into iron with green hydrogen, and the cycle starts again. That makes iron a way to store renewable energy and release it as heat.

Metalot is part of a Brabant ecosystem around iron fuel. TU/e students in Team SOLID built an iron-powder demonstrator, and in 2019 the Province of Noord-Brabant invested one million euros in Metal Power, research on iron powder as a circular energy source. Since its start in 2015, Metalot has brought companies, researchers and governments together around metals and energy. Its Metalot@Work event in 2025 drew more than a hundred participants, and in 2026 it joined the Heat4Buildings project.

In NEON, Metalot represented the metals behind the energy transition. Almost every sustainable technology needs metals, and the scarcity of metals affects how economic and applicable those technologies are. Metals can also replace fossil fuels as energy carriers, in batteries or burned directly as metal fuel. NEON's integral view of wind, solar, grids, electric mobility and storage would show where and when metals would be needed, and how much would need to be recycled. Metalot in turn offered input for modelling metal recycling and the prospects of metal fuels for large-scale energy storage.