BEN HARVEY: What’s foiling greenies’ plans to shut down aluminium industry

A company like Alcoa presents a hell of a conundrum for the climate change movement.

The aluminium it produces is critical to the renewable energy industry (it’s in every wind turbine and solar panel) but the industrial process is one of the most energy-intensive in the world.

Pretty much every stage of processing bauxite into alumina into aluminium generates carbon and other emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect (you don’t hear that phrase much anymore, do you?).

In round numbers, you need to shift half a tonne of earth to get 1t of bauxite, 2-3t of bauxite to produce 1t of alumina and 2t of alumina to make 1t of aluminium.

The process begins with the extraction of bauxite from the ground, mainly in Queensland and southern WA.

For that to happen, carbon-soaking forests are cleared and the earth is dug up by diesel-chugging excavators.

Next comes the four-stage Bayer process.

The bauxite is washed, crushed and mixed with caustic soda to create a slurry which is heated to between 200C and 300C.

The amount of energy required to do just that first bit would make Monty Burns blush, but you need a lot more heat before you get anything useful.

Skip forward a couple of steps, and you are now heating aluminium hydroxide to an astonishing 1000C. That’s literally the temperature of Dr Evil’s favourite thing — liquid hot magma.

Once cooled, the alumina needs to be transported to refineries, which are unhelpfully very far from the mines. The ships used to do that burn shipping oil and the trucks and trains at ports burn yet-more diesel.

Turning alumina into aluminium is achieved via the Hall-Heroult process — a set of actions which makes the Bayer process look like a Greenpeace initiative.

The powdered alumina is fed into pots which contain a molten bath of cryolite heated to between 950C and 970C.

A DC current strong enough to send a DeLorean back to 1985 is then passed through the bath. This creates two things: liquid aluminium (which is siphoned into ladles and cast into ingots) and an enormous amount of carbon dioxide (which goes into the atmosphere).

A shiny, fresh-cut piece of aluminium is one of the purest, cleanest materials you will ever lay eyes on but getting it to that state is a dirty business.

It’s the kind of industry many companies would shy away from, but Alcoa is doubling down.

The American giant has just spent $8.1 billion buying South32’s aluminium assets in Brazil, South Africa and WA.

The Australian operation is Worsley Alumina, which sustains 2000 jobs, and is next door to Alcoa’s own alumina refineries.

Alcoa boss William Oplinger reckons the co-location of the sprawling assets means he will be able to extract enough synergies to make the enlarged portfolio profitable.

Here’s hoping the juice is worth the squeeze because a beefed-up Alcoa is an even bigger target for environmentalists, who already treat the company as their favourite whipping boy.

In February, Alcoa was slapped with an “unprecedented” $55 million penalty by the Federal Government to remediate jarrah forest it cleared without permission in the Perth Hills.

The company has come under close regulatory scrutiny following revelations Water Corporation has serious concerns that the company’s mining would contaminate Serpentine Dam — a vital source of Perth’s drinking water.

The PR headaches continued when the miner was caught out by Australia’s advertising watchdog for gilding the lily about how much land it had rehabilitated.

Alcoa’s self-inflicted uppercuts over the past couple of years have led some to question its social licence to operate.

Others say the environmental damage from forest clearing and the carbon footprint from voracious energy consumption means the aluminium industry should be shut down in Australia.

Re-read the above descriptions of the Hall-Heroult and Bayer processes and it’s easy to side with the greenies.

What’s hard is finding the answer to the question “what then?”

Are we going to stop using aluminium?

Billy Bob Thornton’s character in the TV series Landman delivered a well-known monologue about the ubiquitous nature of oil. Oplinger could do the same for aluminium because, to parrot Thornton’s muse Tommy Norris, “it’s in every fucking thing”.

Not just in the wind turbines and solar panels, it’s in the factories that make the turbines and panels and the trucks that transport them to site.

Aluminium is in the computers and smart phones engineers need to design renewable energy farms, the office towers the engineers work in while doing their designs, the planes they fly in when going to site and the cars they drive when there.

It’s in the conductors in the power lines that get renewable energy to houses and businesses, which themselves are filled with things made from aluminium.

You might be able to get by without drinking cans and foil, but what about window and door frames, furniture, cookware and utensils?

Aluminium is everywhere because it is very light and very strong.

It’s enough to give Greta Thunberg heartburn.

Need an antacid? Aluminium is usually in those, as well as a host as other medications.

So, if we can agree we need aluminium, what will shutting down or restricting Australia’s aluminium industry achieve?

Yes, we will have more forests. Yes, the nation’s carbon footprint will get smaller.

But any environmental gains made locally will be offset by increased production in countries which will take up the slack.

The three biggest producers of aluminium in the world are China, India and Russia.

How much attention do you reckon Xi, Putin and Modi pay to climate change activists?