There was a small item in the Canadian press the other day that almost slipped on by.
Rio Tinto Alcan has successfully launched its 600KA line in Arvida, Quebec. Metal is now flowing, and according to the item in the local press, full production will be reached in the next few weeks.
That’s excellent news for RTA, and I am sure the entire aluminium community congratulates them on achieving this important milestone in aluminium technology.
But I remember sitting in the AMM conference in New York in June last year, where Jacynthe Cote told us that the plant would be up and running by February. Presumably the plant lost 6 months in the 8 months between Ms Cote’s speech and February.
Not that anybody would begrudge RTA for a six month delay on a project so challenging as this. Especially when you consider that this project had its genesis in a 500KA smelter that was going to be built in South Africa almost 10 years ago.
That project died when the South African Government declined to provide the electricity needed. It soon morphed into a demonstration plant to be built in Quebec. That plan suffered a delay when Rio Tinto bought Alcan, and a further delay when the world got caught up in the GFC, and Rio reviewed its capital expenditure program. It went through a couple of other modifications, getting bumped to AP60 instead of AP50, and some changes to the number of pots in phase 1. Nevertheless, it has still taken another 4 years to get the 38 pots built and running.
Of course, the Chinese have had 600KA pots operating for almost a year now, though they too will tell you that it is no easy technology to control. In a pot as big as a 600KA pot, the working area is so big that the pot begins to operate as multiple independent cells. The Chinese have discovered that you can’t control a 600KA pot like you can say a 400Ka pot, as a single entity. Different parts of the pot behave in different ways.
One hopes that RTA’s operations people don’t strike the same problems as the Chinese.
My only concerns are, if it took 4 years to build 38 pots, what sort of demonstration is this to prospective buyers of AP technology. And, oh by the way, who exactly is in the market to buy any smelter technology right now?