Alcoa closing on greener aluminium future: Bill Oplinger
- 30 October 2024
Alcoa may well be one of the best examples of a new-age miner going around in a 130-year-old body. Certainly, the company’s CEO, Bill Oplinger, has no trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
“What gets me out of bed in the morning is I love making aluminium,” he said at IMARC 2024 in Sydney, Australia.
“You may laugh at that but we make a product that makes the world significantly better and we do it in different parts of the world. We’re truly a global operation and we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress in simplifying and growing the company over the last year.
“We’re obviously very bullish aluminium. We’re an aluminium company. As we look forward the demand growth will be driven by this energy transition.
“We are already substituted in certain applications for copper. And as you see the demand outstrip supply of copper on the margin in certain applications aluminium is a very good change-out versus copper.
“So the mega trends are driving aluminium demand growth on a year-over-year basis … whether it's three, four or five per cent every year. And couple that with some supply changes in the industry, for instance, the Chinese sticking to a mandatory cap that they've put in place, that shapes up for a much stronger aluminium industry globally.”
Exposure to green metal production, urban mining and the circular economy are increasingly being cast as key elements of future mining and metals supply entities.
Oplinger told IMARC aluminium with its many favourable properties was already “in just about every part of your life”. That looked set to expand as long as the energy-intensive parts of its value chain were green and it continued to tick other ESG boxes.
“Aluminium is one of the big solutions that is available for the energy transition and the reason why is because of the lightweight story but also the infinite recyclability,” he said.
“An amazing fact is that something like 75% of all the aluminium made in history is still in use today because of the ability to recycle.
“So you’ve got that circular economy almost built into the economics of the industry.
“Now for us that’s an opportunity and maybe a potential threat also. The reason why I say that is because when we look at future demand growth of aluminium, primary aluminium is growing at one level, recycled aluminium is growing at a much different level. The recyclability of aluminium is driving solutions towards the purchase of scrap and the need to recycle scrap.
“That’s part of the recyclability story.
“On the process side, as an energy-intensive industry, we’re constantly looking at opportunities to decarbonise but also reuse certain key inputs.
“We are a heavy water user in certain parts of the world. We’re looking at opportunities to recapture the water molecule [including through electric calcination].
“We [also] generate residue mud, or residue, in the process of refining bauxite into alumina. We’re the first to implement in Australia the recapture of some of that liquid coming out of the residue in order to put it back into the process through residue filtration.”
Oplinger said Alcoa aimed to eliminate the residue waste, including through reuse of the material.
“And then in the smelting part of the business it’s around energy reduction – going to greener sources of energy globally. Today, 87% of our energy is low-carbon sustainable energy,” he said.
The next big breakthrough for the business once known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, and for the electrolysis smelting process, was ELYSIS.
“We have customers, specifically in places like Europe, who are demanding low-carbon products,” Oplinger said.
“So we’ve developed the broadest set of low-carbon products, inclusive of a low-carbon alumina, which is the intermediate product between bauxite and aluminium, and two low-carbon aluminium products that allow our customers to try to meet their decarbonisation targets.
“That’s on the customer side.
“But just as importantly, on the process side … we, along with a joint venture partner, Rio Tinto, are working on a completely decarbonised aluminium smelting process.
“It’s something we've been working on for close to 50 years now.
“We will have the first commercial-size cells installed in Quebec by the end of this year. So we’ve made a massive breakthrough in that process and it will establish us with Rio Tinto as the world's leaders on low-carbon solutions.”
Oplinger said he had no trouble getting out of bed each day. What kept him awake at night?
“There’s specific micro risks around the world that I worry about,” he said.
“But the broader risk that I consider, with our employees, is can we move fast enough?
“The world is really moving quickly. We’re a 130-year-old company. That’s great. We have great history. We’ve got great processes.
“Can we move quickly enough to take advantage of some of the things that are changing?”
