The Australian Aluminium smelting industry is having a rough
time. Built to utilize electricity from Australian coal from the 1960’s through
the 1980’s, our smelters are ill equipped to deal with the migration of the
Aluminium industry to a rapidly industrializing China or cheap low-carbon
energy areas such as Iceland or New Zealand. As a result, the Kurri Kurri
smelter closed in 2012, the Point Henry smelter closed in 2014, and the future
for the Portland
smelter is currently uncertain, with the contract for electricity due to be
renegotiated this month.
At the same time, Australia is lagging the rest of
the developed world in the transition to low emissions electricity. Although
certain jurisdictions, like South
Australia, are making progress, the fragile nature of
the grid connections and the intermittent nature on renewable energy is slowing
its uptake, and potentially contributing to supply instability, as was seen
during this winter’s South Australian storm.
The production of aluminium metal requires a huge amount of
electricity. An
aluminum smelter basically consists of a huge tub of molten
salt, from which the enormous electrical currents basically force the electrons
onto aluminum ions, depositing them on the cathode atom by atom at a rate that
allows several tons of production per day.
As a result, aluminium smelters are typically located in
areas where there is a large, cheap supply of electricity. Traditionally these
have been areas of hydroelectric power, or in Australia’s case, cheap open cut
thermal coal. With coal getting more expensive, and with concerns over the
impact of CO2 production on the climate, these coal-powered smelters are
finding it harder to compete in high wage countries. So Australia has
facilities which are designed to take a substantial proportion of the energy
grid’s electricity, which are getting closed down just as the requirement for storage
of large amounts of variable renewable energy is appearing.
One proposed solution of the “storage problem” is the use of
a new technology known as the
liquid metal battery. Like the aluminium smelting
process, the liquid metal battery consists of a molten salt, which can have
ions driven out of it to the anode and the cathode when power is applied. Unlike
aluminium, the anode is a base metal instead of graphite, so instead of
oxidizing the anode and making CO
2, the metal is deposited. This allows the
battery to discharge by dissolving the anode and cathode back into the molten
salt. So if aluminum smelters are going obsolete in areas which are in desperate
need of battery storage, it seems like modifying the smelter to store energy is
a option worth at least considering.
There are technical issues, of course. An industrial Hall-Héroult
cell is the size of a city bus, and a smelter contains lots of them. The liquid
metal technology is being developed by a small company,
Ambri, which seems to
be starting small (like bottlecap scale), and scaling up. So there is a bit of
a gap between the emerging battery technology and the aging smelter technology.
But it is in everybody’s interest to bridge it.
Ambri is trying to raise cash and start production. South Australia is still investigating their
state-wide blackout.
Alcoa and
Hydro
have two shuttered smelters which they need to remediate or repurpose, and Portland has 11% of its population working at the smelter. In addition, Boyne
Island and Tomago are
supposedly facing similar market pressures.
Portland
would be a particularly useful place for a pilot project, since the smelter is still
operating, even though the pain of closing a big industrial center in a small
isolated town looms. It is also located in prime wind power country, on the Victoria / South
Australia border, close to the
interconnector. So it would be nice if the
union,
the
council, the
state and
federal governments, and the industry groups could
work together to see if there is a solution that benefits everybody.
