Alcoa's plans for new aluminum capacity hinge on Elysis technology: executives

Any plans for Alcoa to build new aluminum smelting capacity across its global operations will hinge on the successful development of its inert anode Elysis technology, which is slated to reach commercial deployment as early as 2024, company executives said Nov. 9.

"When we look to the future, the answer is very much tied into Elysis and also tied into the developments of the market and how we see some of those supply-demand fundamentals coming through," CEO Roy Harvey told investors during an annual meeting, in reference to Alcoa's future growth outlook.

"We are putting all of our efforts and all of our concentration into making Elysis very successful," Harvey said.

Until Elysis has reached commercial viability, Harvey said Alcoa has no plans to expand existing facilities or build new smelters that utilize the traditional, more carbon-intensive Hall-Héroult smelting process. Instead, the company will consider were Elysis can be retrofitted into current smelters or installed in new smelters, he added.

"We need the technology to work," Harvey said of Elysis. "We can start doing some of the design work and some of the work with governments... but in the end, that first real greenfield or brownfield or retrofit opportunity to put Elysis into place would come once it's been demonstrated."

Elysis is a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto, and the technology is now being tested at the latter's Alma smelter in Quebec.

The Elysis process utilizes an inert anode, rather than a carbon-based anode, in a smelter cell to eliminate all direct greenhouse gases from conventional aluminum smelting and instead emit oxygen. The technology is expected to be installed primarily in smelters that are powered by renewable energy.

Though installation of the technology in smelters is projected to begin in 2024, Alcoa Chief Innovation Officer Benjamin Kahrs said aluminum production from Elysis is not expected until at least 2026.

The technology will be implemented in smelters operated by the joint venture partners, but Elysis will also be licensed out to third-party companies to a certain extent, Kahrs added.

"If you think about the targets that are set forth for the aluminum industry, 75% of all the CO2 in the entire industry has to be out by 2035... and then by 2050, 97% of it has to be out," he said. "Unless there's an effective carbon capture and storage, it's a fundamental imperative for every aluminum producer in the world to convert to inert anode smelting, and so our intent is to license that technology."

While Elysis is under development, Alcoa will still look for opportunities to restore aluminum capacity at lower carbon-intensive facilities, Chief Commercial Officer Timothy Reyes said.

Alcoa to recycle scrap for high-purity output

Kahrs said Elysis will offer significant cost savings at smelters by removing expenses tied to the carbon anode supply chain.

"When you take out the carbon anode value chain, you take out all of the coal tar pitch, the calcined coke, your bake furnaces, your green mill, all of the energy that goes into it and all the emissions you have to capture and address," he said. "When you have Elysis and inert anodes, all of that goes away, as does a significant amount of labor for the operation because of those."

Over time, Kahrs said capital and operational expenditures for new and existing smelters would also decrease with Elysis because the facilities would no longer require an associated carbon plant to produce the anodes.

In addition to Elysis, Pittsburgh-based Alcoa plans to lower its carbon footprint by implementing a patented metal purification process, called ASTRAEA, to recycle post-consumer aluminum scrap into high-purity aluminum, Harvey said.

"We believe that our ASTRAEA metal purification process has the potential to fundamentally and significantly change how low-quality post-consumer aluminum scrap can be recycled," he said. "Our process can create high-purity aluminum that far exceeds the purity of commercial-grade metal produced in a smelter."

ASTRAEA could create a new value chain to economically produce P0101 aluminum, which surpasses the purity of commodity-grade P1020, from lower-quality zorba auto shred scrap, according to a separate statement Nov. 8.

"Today, there is a vast supply of aluminum scrap that can only be used for limited applications due its combination of impurities," Alcoa said in the statement. "There are no commercially available processes to strip [zorba] scrap of trace metals and bring it to the suitable purity for most rolling or extrusion applications. Alcoa's ASTRAEA process is the first and only technology that can purify this low-value scrap."

The technology will also allow the low-value scrap to be processed into aluminum that can be used in some specialty aerospace and defense applications, which typically require primary aluminum, Alcoa added.