Ramesh Singh, in Applied Welding Engineering (Third Edition), 2020. Smelting. Smelting is an energy intensive process used to refine an ore into a usable metal. Most ore deposits contain metals in a reacted or combined form, such as magnetite (Fe 3 O 4), hematite (Fe 2 O 3), goethite (αFeO(OH)), limonite (generic formula for limonite is FeO(OH)·nH 2 O), and siderite (FeCO 3), which are iron