Alcoa announces ‘Technology Roadmap’ for aluminium industry, includes ASTRAEA and ELYSIS

On Monday, November 8, Alcoa Corporation disclosed a technology roadmap for the aluminium industry to achieve a sustainable future, attaining net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 across global operations. 

The list of technologies included a new, proprietary post-consumer scrap recycling process and processes to design a refinery that lowers capital intensity, eliminates carbon emissions, and addresses other industry challenges.

“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,” Harvey added.

The technology developed by Alcoa to purify any post-consumer aluminium scrap into a purity level of P0101 is called ASTRAEA technology, the first and only technology that can purify low-value scrap. The purity level will surpass the purity of P1020 aluminium that is produced at any commercial smelter. As feedstock of this process, Alcoa will use Zorba auto shred scrap as raw material. This one-of-a-kind technology will enable aluminium manufacturers to blend lower-purity scrap with high purity aluminium for increasing the pool of reusable post-consumer scrap.

Another technology developed by Alcoa, called The Refinery of the Future, is for designing a refinery that lowers capital intensity, eliminates carbon emissions, and addresses other industry challenges, including reducing or eliminating bauxite residue. From the environmental perspective, it will be designed around two technologies – mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) and electric calcination. When combined with a decarbonized grid, these two technologies enable a pathway to a zero-emissions alumina refining system.

Last, but not the least, the ELYSIS process that has the potential to revolutionise the smelting process of aluminium by removing all carbon dioxide emissions, while lowering operating costs and improving productivity. ELYSIS is now producing aluminium with the carbon-free smelting process at its Industrial Research and Development Center, using a full industrial design, as was announced last week.