By Stephen Nakrosis
Alcoa Corp. on Monday unveiled a technology roadmap which it says supports its vision to "reinvent the aluminum industry for a sustainable future."
Alcoa said the technologies, which include "a new, proprietary post-consumer scrap recycling process, have the potential to decarbonize a significant portion of the upstream aluminum supply chain and provide a competitive advantage in a carbon-constrained world."
The company said its roadmap contains three key programs. The first, "The Refinery of the Future," aims to reduce the capital cost of developing a refinery and enable decarbonization of the alumina-refining process, Alcoa said.
Alcoa said the second program is the Astraea metal-purification process, which was developed by the company to recycle post-consumer aluminum scrap into high-purity aluminum. "The process could create an entirely new value chain to economically produce aluminum of a quality that far exceeds the purity of the commercial-grade aluminum produced in a smelter," it said.
The third program is the Elysis joint venture, which is built around technology that eliminates all greenhouse gases from the traditional smelting process. The process was first 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.
Roy Harvey, the company's president and chief executive, said, "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."
Write to Stephen Nakrosis at stephen.nakrosis@wsj.com
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