The Challenge of Building a New Aluminum Smelting Plant: The Electric Bill

wsj.com

2 points·jseliger··5 comments

I wonder how scale changes this operation.

Would a day time only, small batch mill work next to a solar farm in Texas? Is there away to avoid running this all night?

Can you pay your staff enough, automate the plant enough that you get out of the seasonal cycle (long days in summer short in winter).

And before someone says nuclear like the commenter at the end of the article, that looses out of the gate on price.

IANAM (Not A Metallurgist), but my understanding is that "bulk hot metallurgy", like smelting aluminum, has major efficiencies both from large scale and from running continuously. With fixed costs, labor, etc. - a small & part-time plant probably would not be economically viable, even with "free" electricity.

I know that steel isn't aluminum but the mini mill for steel changed everything:

Here is a current example of marketing hype around this: https://www.primetals.com/portfolio/mini-mills/mini-mills-fo...

They arent new, but they did kill big steel in America: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno... (long but a great read).

I would have thought that aluminum would have gone this way as well.

Again, IANAM...but an aluminum smelter produces bulk metallic aluminum from ores (generally aluminum oxide, Al2O3). Vs. the input to a steel mini-mill is almost all bulk & scrap steel (not ire ore), and its output is various steel products - bars, beams, pipes, rebar, wire, sheets, and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_mill

https://archive.ph/xEs5F

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