Aluminum sells itself—it’s light, it lasts forever, and it’s the most recycled material on Earth! It takes so much energy to make that it has been nicknamed “solid electricity,” but when it’s made with hydroelectric power, some call it “green.” I call this light blue aluminum, but that is another story.
And the world’s largest supplier of hydro-powered aluminum is En+ Group IPJSC—a Russian company that was, until recently, controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska who, according to E&E News, just fled to Sri Lanka.
We have noted before that aluminum made with clean electricity has one-fifth of the carbon footprint of aluminum made with coal-fired electricity. En+ controls 15.1 gigawatts of installed hydropower capacity which it uses to make 20% of the world’s supply of hydro-powered aluminum. Like Rio Tinto and Alcoa and its “revolutionary” aluminum, En+ has developed an “inert anode” technology that gets rid of the carbon anode and has oxygen as a byproduct instead of carbon dioxide (CO2). The company claims: “The metallurgical segment En + Group is developing new material to create an inert anode. Not only the new technology prevents oxidizing (which will reduce costs), it will completely eliminate harmful emissions.”
European and North American countries have studiously avoided boycotts on critical materials like Russian aluminum, but many companies have stopped buying from Russian sources—most notably Anheuser-Busch, which has made a major commitment to cleaner aluminum and had a deal with En+. Aluminum expert and analyst Uday Patel of Wood Mackenzie tells E&E that being cut off from En+ presents “a huge challenge.”
Patel is correct. The only truly sustainable aluminum is recycled, what I called “dark green aluminum.” That’s because all virgin aluminum is made from alumina, which comes from bauxite that’s cooked at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In “There’s No Such Thing as Carbon-Free Aluminum,” I quoted the Financial Review’s Matthew Stevens, who said, “Until alumina arrives emissions-free, no one can claim to be selling greenhouse emissions-free aluminum.”
I wrote earlier about this:
We’re in a Crisis and We Have to Change Now
Change has been happening astonishingly quickly since the invasion of Ukraine; energy policies are being rewritten daily. People are contemplating changes they never would have considered.
Meanwhile, aluminum prices have spiked to their highest prices ever and shipments from China, which usually is a net consumer rather than exporter, are happening because the price is so high.
According to Bloomberg:
This is all that I called “dark brown” aluminum, made with coal-fired electricity, with five times the carbon footprint of hydro-electric powered “light blue” aluminum. This is a step backward. Carl A. Zimring got it right in his 2017 book, “Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective”:
If we are going to not buy Russian hydro-powered aluminum, then we have to cut back our consumption accordingly, just like we are talking about with natural gas. We could do that by “lightweighting” everything, by making smaller and lighter pickup trucks and cars that use less aluminum. We could promote refillable bottles instead of cans for soft drinks and beer, or put a big honking deposit on them so that we know that they are returned. We could put a carbon tax on aluminum that varies according to its carbon footprint—its “color.”
It may be taking a war to motivate us to do this, but we have a climate emergency as well as a Russia problem. And we have to give something up rather than buy more dirty aluminum.
