The scale, proximity of customers and even the carbon reduction efforts of China’s huge aluminium smelters will make it very difficult for older, smaller, less-integrated facilities like Tomago in NSW to compete, veteran energy analyst Tim Buckley says.
Buckley, the head of Climate Energy Finance who returned recently to Australia from his latest trip to China, said the “staggering” scale of manufacturing and the speed of construction there put Australia’s $2.5 billion efforts to bail out facilities such as Tomago in the shade.
The visit took in the Hongtai Aluminium smelter in the southern province of Yunnan. Construction on the site began in December 2019, with the first metal produced within a year.
Annual output is now 2.03 million tonnes, the most for any single site in the world, or triple Tomago’s yearly production of about 590,000 tonnes.
Buckley said he travelled with an Australian advisor to the Yunnan smelter’s owner, China Hongqiao Group. “I don’t know why we bother,” the advisor, a former head of the International Aluminium Institute, told him.
