Aluminum: Important for more than beer and soda

Everyone is familiar with the humble aluminum can. But not so many people realize what a crucial material aluminum is in the modern world. I’m writing an article about a recent grant to help a company build a new aluminum smelter, and am so happy to have this newsletter to share a little bit about what I’m learning that might not make it into the article.

Why does aluminum matter?

You might be wondering why I’m writing about aluminum in a newsletter about climate change mitigation. It’s because the energy transition can’t happen without aluminum, and in an unhappy coincidence, it takes a fairly large amount of energy to make aluminum.

Aluminum is necessary to make solar panels, transmission wires, windmill turbines, electric cars, batteries, and a whole lot of other stuff like electronics and even military armor. Basically, everything we need to move away from fossil fuels and to renewable energy from almost any source, plus lots of things we use already, requires aluminum.

So, in order to save the planet, we need a material that hogs up energy, which often comes from sources that contribute to the destruction we need to stop. Or at least that’s how it has worked in the US.

Back up about 40 years

In the 1980s there were dozens of aluminum plants in the United States. Today there are so few you can count them on the fingers of one hand—and you don’t even need your thumb. There’s not an easy cut-and-dried answer for why this happened, but at least one factor in the last decade or so has been the price of energy.

Aluminum is made from a type of sedimentary rock called bauxite. Bauxite is turned into alumina through a “wet chemical leach method.” Alumina is then basically cooked “in a molten bath of natural or synthetic cryolite” — this is the smelting part of the whole process — and the result is the aluminum that is used to make all kinds of products.

Smelting requires massive amounts of heat, and in the United States, the energy to create that heat has historically come from fossil fuels, which, as most of us know, has gotten pretty expensive (not to mention the whole greenhouse gas thing). In Canada most of the energy used to produce aluminum comes from hydropower. In Norway and Iceland it mostly comes from geothermal power.

The majority of the aluminum made in the world today comes from Russia, India, the United Arab Emirates, and China. Some of those places are problematic (to put it mildly) and they all involve supply chains which are increasingly vulnerable, and all that transporting creates more emissions.

The times are changing

One of the things that has led so many people to feel sense of doom about climate change is the fact so much of modern society runs on oil and gas. From stoves in our houses to flights for vacations, and from manufacturing materials like steel to moving goods around the globe, it seems like fossil fuels are at the heart of every modern convenience.

One of the most baffling sectors to decarbonize is heavy industry. For a long time people referred to industry as “hard to abate sectors.” The amount of energy required for processes like making steel is mind-boggling. It would take a LOT of solar panels! But it’s happening.

Part of the reason it’s happening is that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Another is that more sources of clean energy are coming into use. Along with solar and hydropower, wind and hydrogen can provide energy. Finally, batteries are better than they ever have been, making renewable energy more flexible than in the past.

New smelters are expensive

One of the arguments against doing anything about climate change (which makes no sense) is the steep upfront costs. Building an aluminum smelter requires billions of dollars. Building one that operates on renewable energy requires agreements with the companies that will supply that energy, plus siting it in a place close to the energy source or planning for transmitting or storing it.

Yet, it’s clearly profitable to do so, or there wouldn’t be aluminum manufacturing facilities around the world. Plus, demand for aluminum is steadily increasing as countries everywhere work to decarbonize.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) included provisions and funding that are making the transition to clean energy in the US much more possible. In March, the Department of Energy announced grants totaling $6 billion for 33 projects, including a $500 million grant for an aluminum smelter powered by non-carbon sources.

Details are lacking as of now. But, the fact is Century Aluminum has a plan to build an aluminum smelting plant in the US that will operate using clean energy. That will mean a critical material for the rest of the transition will be more available—here and around the world—and that people will have jobs and there’ll be less concern about supply chain issues.

Learning about decarbonization is taking me down some surprising and interesting roads. A year ago, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d know as much about aluminum as I do today—or that I’d be trying to find out more about concrete (an even bigger problem climate-wise). Hopefully, I’ll know enough about what’s happening in that industry by the next issue!