Aluminum: concentrated electricity.

Ok – you’ve had the gold post. Now for a post about another metal. But first – let me back up on the gold topic before segueing to today’s metal…

Two questions…

1. How much gold has humanity extracted in all of history?

2. How much gold‘s left in the Earth’s crust?

I’ll answer :)…

1. If we trust this source, the total amount of gold ever mined in the world is about 216,000 tons (with two-thirds of it mined after 1950!). All of it would fit into a cube measuring 22x22x22 meters. Basically, that’s about the size of a skinny six or seven-story cube-shaped building. Not that much really. And if you rolled all that precious metal into a ball, you’d get a sphere with a diameter of over 26 meters.

2. As for what remains, the numbers vary wildly. From 40,000 to 80,000 tons could still be dug up. But what happens after that? Well, obviously, we’d have to start bringing gold from the Moon, Mars, and Venus – if that’s even possible. But can you imagine how much that would cost?

So that’s the deal with gold. There’s not much left, and the price just keeps going up. Time to move on to another metal – and the industrial systems used to make it…

Here’s a 90%-automated industrial system, where, under the constant watch of digital telemetry and automatic “iron hands”, rectangular containers filled with gray liquid metal move along a conveyor belt. The liquid solidifies, the solidified bars are shaken out, stacked, and packaged by those same iron hands. And you could watch this process forever. So – what’s the metal?…

…Aluminum!

// Thus – we’ve jumped from box 79 (gold: Au) to 13 (aluminum: Al). in the periodic table.

And welcome to the world of  new metals!

What do I mean by the “world of new metals”? It’s simple! Humans have known about gold for thousands of years (the pre-ancients probably just stumbled across gold nuggets, while gold mining and smelting date back at least to Ancient Egypt). But this aluminum was only first produced in 1824, and then announced to the world the following year – by Danish physicist Hand Christian Ørsted. Woah – 200 years almost to the year!

Originally, producing aluminum was so expensive that the metal itself was actually sometimes twice the price of gold (!). Fine jewelry, crazy-expensive tableware, and all sorts of other luxury items were made from it. But then, at the end of the 19^th century, they invented electrolytic aluminum smelting.

Ever since, aluminum production has been pretty standard: bauxite + [some chemical magic] -> alumina -> electrolysis -> liquid metal = aluminum. Simple enough. Or is it? No, not really. If you want to know more, welcome to: the Boguchany Aluminium Smelting Plant ->

We were kindly invited here by our respected customer – not so much for it to show off the sheer might of the plant, but more to demonstrate the degree of automation, and to discuss prospects for further joint projects ensuring the cybersecurity of this colossal facility.

We walk into a production hall and are immediately blown away by the scale involved: the main workshops are 1200 meters long! Oh my gigantic!

First shop: finished product casting (aluminum bars) and storage:

Second shop: this is where the liquid aluminum is made. Along its full 1.2 kilometers length, there are lined up huge units called electrolyzers where they “cook” the aluminum:

If you open the door of an electrolyzer, you get an idea of just how hot it gets in there – almost 1000°C! ->

So what exactly happens in there?

In short: they pour in the electrolyte, which is a mixture of alumina and some other chemical (I peeked at Wikipedia: it’s called “cryolite”). Then they insert electrodes, pump in a whole load of electricity, and as a result, the alumina (aluminum oxide) splits into oxygen and the aluminum itself, which settles to the bottom of the electrolyzer in molten form.

There are many more technological nuances and innovations, of course, but that’s it in a nutshell. Oh, and they didn’t even let us take a photo of the entire electrolyzer – too many patented secrets there.

And because these electrolyzers gobble up so much electricity, they generate powerful magnetic fields, so things like delicate smartphones and smartwatches can get wrecked under such conditions (they warn you beforehand and ask you to leave all your gadgets outside). And I can vouch for this: my Sony Alpha 1 camera freaked out several times when next to an electrolyzer. The intense magnetism seemed to blow its mind. But I finally managed to tame the beast and got my shots!

So, what’s next in the production process? The liquid aluminum gets drawn off into crucibles:

The aluminum gets poured out of the crucibles into aluminum baths, and then it’s all cast into molds. // I should mention: I’m not an expert on this techy stuff, so I might be using the wrong terminology – if so, my apologies.

Here are those baths with the molten aluminum:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any closer (no tourists allowed here), so all I’ve got is a shot taken from afar. But believe me, there’s a lot of molten aluminum in there (I saw something like this at the Khakass aluminum plant back in 2012, but didn’t get any photos).

Next, it’s poured into the molds:

The molds then ride a conveyor to the stacking robot where they’re emptied of aluminum after it solidifies along the way to form the final product:

Watching the robot arm stack the bars into piles is seriously hypnotic:

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting… On the screen to the right of the stacker, there’s a photo of the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore – one of my all-time favorites. I was like, “Why Singapore?” The answer: “We were looking for a nice picture online to use as the wallpaper on this machine – and picked this one.” Well why not?! ->

Here’s an interesting fact: output is 588,000 tons per year, using up 8,300,000,000kWh of electricity. A quick calculation… and, yes – that gives 14MWh per ton. Yep, the production of aluminum takes a massive, industrial amount of electricity! (But sources on the internet give a larger figure; and I worked it out: it looks like Rusal‘s production technology innovations help them save 3MWh per ton of produced aluminum! Go Rusal!)

Basically, an average regional power plant would need to give 100% of its output just to smelt a single ton of aluminum per hour! That’s exactly why aluminum is only smelted where electricity is relatively cheap, or absolutely necessary.

China – obviously, a leader in electricity production and, really, the world economy. India – makes sense, they’ve got plenty of hydropower (see the list of countries as per hydroelectricity). Not far behind is Russia, which is nice. The UAE makes aluminum on cheap Qatar gas. And so on. In other words, aluminum is just concentrated electricity!

But we weren’t here just here for the tour. I also gave a lecture on industrial cybersecurity to the management ->

And that was that: Boguchany Aluminium Plant – done. Time for us to be heading out yet further on our Siberian travels…

PS: Who can guess what major industrial landmark should be found next to an aluminum plant? Clue: the answer’s somewhere in the above!…