The objective of this paper is to investigate the energy conservation and resource utilization in the smelting process of ferrochrome pellets. Based on the laws of mass and energy conservation, the material and energy flows model has been established in the smelting process of steel belt sintering-submerged arc furnace. To better understand the smelting process from disorder state to order state under energy conservation and resource utilization, the synergy model related to the material and energy has been developed. The state change depends on the fluctuations to the energy critical point. The fluctuations are defined as order parameters, which satisfy all the smelting processes. The value of synergy degree is set as the evaluating indicator to assess the smelting process. The results show that the energy efficiencies of three smelting equipments are 42.89%, 66.17% and 61.44%, respectively. Also, the energy efficiency of the smelting process is 49.15%. The value of synergy degree is 0.584. Several suggestions for the smelting process are proposed based on the synergy model. The synergy degree of the suggestions is 0.632. The present work has a potential to improve the smelting process in efficiency. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.