Alcoa announces roadmap to reinventing aluminum industry for sustainability

Pittsburgh-based Alcoa Corp., announced Monday that it created a technology roadmap to support the company’s vision to reinvent the aluminum industry for a sustainable future.

The company said the technologies in the roadmap have the potential to decarbonize parts of the upstream aluminum supply chain and provide a competitive advantage in a “carbon-constrained world.”

“Our technology roadmap represents an array of next-generation solutions that could significantly reduce emissions across the upstream value chain and concurrently generate significant stockholder value,” said Alcoa President and CEO Roy Harvey. “Our Refinery of the Future design and the ELYSIS zero carbon smelting technology, as just two examples, not only aim to reduce costs and improve efficiency in aluminum production, but target complete reduction of greenhouse gas generation from their respective production processes.”

The new technologies include a proprietary post-consumer recycling process that would take aluminum scrap and turn it into high-purity aluminum. The company said the process could create a new value chain to economically produce a high-quality aluminum that exceeds the purity of commercial-grade, smelter-produced aluminum.

The company also outlined plans for a “Refinery of the Future,” that would reduce the capital cost of developing refineries while enabling the decarbonization of the refining process, using mechanical vapor recompression and electric calcination, among other processes and technologies.

Additionally, a joint venture technology, called the ELYSIS, would eliminate all greenhouse gases from the traditional smelting process. The process uses electrode design and proprietary material developed at the Alcoa Technical Center and emits pure oxygen as a byproduct at a lower operating and capital cost than conventional technology, the company said.

“Alcoa developed the aluminum industry more than 135 years ago, and that legacy of innovation motivates us to help create a better future for tomorrow – one where we are leveraging our products, processes, and people to realize our vision to reinvent the aluminum industry for a sustainable future,” Harvey said.

The roadmap supports the company’s goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 across its global operations, the company said.