Energy Saving Production Process for Energy Saving Aluminum

December 10, 2006 – Vol. 11 No. 38

ENERGY SAVING PRODUCTION PROCESS FOR ENERGY SAVING ALUMINUM.

Without light and strong aluminum, carmakers couldn’t shed a few pounds to save fuel and beer would come in heavy steel kegs and cans burdening the load of truckers and thus consuming more fuel.

While recycling aluminum seems successful - more than 50-percent of aluminum cans are recycled in the US and more than 90-percent of automotive aluminum is recycled - extracting alumina from bauxite ore is an energy intensive process. It takes 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than to make it in the first place.

Fortunately, aluminum is often made with renewable energies. Iceland, for instance, could soon have total aluminum production capacity of 1,542,000 metric tons per year (mtpy) when proposed new smelters and existing facilities are all online. Little Iceland would then produce the equivalent of 14 percent, or so, of all the aluminum metal produced in the US. All of the plants in Iceland would be powered by hydropower or the nation’s well-known geothermal power sources.

Overall energy consumption needed to make aluminum metal has reduced in the last 50 years from about 12 kilowatts per pound to about 7 kilowatts today. Alcan has developed a process to cut energy consumption even further.

The company’s research and development operation in France has developed a process that will cut the energy currently needed in smelting by 20 percent. The new method was a redesign of the carbon cathodes used in the aluminum electrolysis process.

With the announcement of the new energy-efficient production process, the company wasted no time taking the first steps to bring it into production.

Alcan says it will now spend $550 million in a pilot plant in Quebec, Canada that will use the new proprietary smelting technology it calls AP50. The pilot plant will initially produce 60,000 tons of aluminum metal each year. The company plans to expand its production capacity with the new process to 450,000 tons per year. All of the power for the new capacity and the pilot plant will come from renewables, says Alcan.

Less weight, with the same strength as steel, is considered one of the best ways to improve fuel economy.

Visit Alcan at http://www.alcan.com/ the Aluminum Association http://www.aluminum.org/