Pain Points, Potential Solutions and Scientific Challenges in the Development of Primary Magnesium Industry

China has become the world’s largest primary magnesium producer and magnesium ingot exporter since the be-ginning of 21^st century. However, in recent years, the technological progress of primary magnesium industry has slowed down and there has been a lack of new technologies, making it difficult to meet the country’s increasingly tightened energy conser-vation and environmental protection policies, and facing an unprecedented survival crisis. To promote the sustainable development of China’s primary magnesium industry, an increase in research and development funding is urgently needed from the state so as to attract high-level research teams and initiate novel and disruptive technological innovations. A series of key issues in existing primary magnesium production processes have been identified in this article, like low efficiency and high energy consumption of dolomite calcination, the lack of large-scale reduction equipment for the silicothermic process, high costs and energy consumption of reducing agents, low efficiency and poor environment of refining process and inaccurate composition detection of magnesium ingots. Through in-depth analysis of the origin of the above issues, corresponding innovative solutions are put forward, such as the high-efficiency suspension calcination process for dolomite powder, a wall-type large-scale reduction system, pho-tovoltaic solid waste silicon sludge reducing agents, pressure refining technology under a fully inert atmosphere protection, and pure magnesium reference samples with low content, etc. It also highlights high-value scientific problems of these ideas and sketches a new blueprint for an efficient, energy-saving, green and low-carbon silicothermic magnesium smelting process.