I grew up next to a couple of aluminium smelters. They ran on hydro electricity, basically what happened was a ton of water was released from a reservoir high up on a hillside down some massive pipes. The water turned the turbines to generate the electricity and at night, when electricity was cheaper, they’d pump the water back up the hill again. The water outflow from the factory was called the Tailrace and it used to terrify me as a young child, they sent it down these concrete half pipes out into the loch and it was so fast, it looked almost boiling and it wasn’t until I visited Niagara Falls that I saw water quite as ‘angry’ as that again.
Factory is long closed now, and I don’t know where we get aluminium from. Probably China. Anyway, here’s a picture of the hydro pipes on the hill and thanks for indulging my (mildly terrifying) h2O memories of long ago.
View attachment 6973498
We get aluminum by melting a crushing up a rock called bauxite and then running a lot of electricity through it to trigger the chemical reaction that produces an aluminum oxide which is later turned into pure aluminum.
It takes like zero energy to recycle aluminum through and it's practically infinitely recyclable.
There are only four operational smelters left in the United States:
- Alcoa Warrick operations outside Evansville, which is powered by a nearby coal-fired power plant that Alcoa owns.
- Alcoa Massena operations in Massena, NY, which is powered by hydropower from the St. Lawrence River.
- Century Aluminum Hawesville operations in Hawesville, KY, which is powered by a coal-fired power plant on the Ohio River. A nearby plant in Sebree, also owned by Century, shut down in 2021 because its energy costs exceeded its marginal revenue.
- Century Aluminum in Mt. Holly, South Carolina, which has been embroiled in a very public battle with the state energy monopoly over its cost of energy.
Most of our new aluminum is imported from Canada, much of it from Quebec, which sells its abundant hydropower to the smelters for next to nothing. A good deal of it came from Russia before the whole Ukraine invasion thing, and now the Gulf States like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are getting into aluminum smelting since they have abundant solar and oil energy capacity. Century also runs a major smelter in Iceland, where they can get cheap geothermal power.
Century is planning to build a state of the art greenfield smelter in Kentucky along the Ohio River, upstream from its Hawesville smelter, but that's still several years out. It's also the first new smelter built in the U.S. since the 1970s. So, on top of having to contend with expensive power, many of these smelters are old as dirt and thus not as efficient and much more maintenance-intensive than the newer ones in other countries.
Now, there are a LOT of recycling operations run by Novelis and various other companies, since the demand for aluminum cans and automotive panels keeps increasing year over year and aluminum is comparatively cheap and easy to recycle as you said. However, if push comes to shove and we're thrust into a war with say, China, and our consumption of aluminum exceeds recycling stocks, and while I'm not a metallurgist, I've been told certain grades of military-grade aluminum require new smelted aluminum free of contamination from copper or iron, and if we're unable to import what we need, we're gonna be in quite a bit of trouble.
Also, the U.S. does not have commercially viable stocks of bauxite, unlike say iron ore. Most of it comes from Australia, Brazil, Jamaica, or Africa. Therefore, securing a supply chain for aluminum also requires securing our access to them in other countries. We cannot brute force our way out of this problem with tariffs unfortunately. If Trump is serious about this he should be pushing to either have new smelters built or refurbish and restart old ones.
