cheap aluminum from rocks and sun
Alusol is developping technologies to produce aluminum from rocks and sun. Aluminum is one of the largest electricity consumer. One third of its price comes from electricity, but thanks to solar panels getting cheaper every year, we can slash the production price and reduce production to a simple resilient system.
Aluminum is a great metal. It is lightweight, easy-to-work, corrosion resistant, abundant and great at conducting electricity. The metal is used extensively in construction (frames and roofing), transportation (car panels), packing (soda cans), electricity (cables). Even though its market is 100 billion dollar a year, it remains an underutilized metal because of its (relatively) high price compared to steel.
Aluminum is a recent metal only being discovered in the 19-century. Its production doesn't rely on the primitive carbo-thermal reduction like steel, but needs an electrical current to extract the aluminum from its the raw material alumina.
Hall-Heroult reaction is the most common production process, but its high temperature poses a problem when intermittent electricity source like solar panels are used. Fortunately, there exist more intermittent friendly reactions. The one we use is called the Orsted reaction. It was developed and industrialized in the 70s by Alcoa, but was dropped due to a combination of market factors. Nowaday, and thanks to recent technical innovation, it has become the most promising way to produce aluminum at a low price and with no carbon emission.
Al2O3 + 3.Cl2 + 3.CO --[heat]--> 2.AlCl3 + 3.CO2
2.AlCl3 --[electricity]--> 2.Al + 3.Cl2
Aluminum smelters from all over the world, but most are established in China. In the West, the largest competitor is Rio Tinto.
Aluminum price mainly comes from electricity price. The cheaper your electricity gets the larger your margin is. Nowaday, the cheapest electricity comes from solar panels IF you don't store the energy and use it intermittently.
This one small condition completly disqualified the standard process (Hall-Heroult). And our competitor, who rely exclusively on it, cannot adapt to this new reality.
We are expecting to a significant larger margin, thanks to our low cost electicity. This enables us to lower price where our competitors cannot go. And because of decades of optimizations, they cannot hope to gain anymore margin and do the same without drastically changing.
Standard process produces about 5 % margin with an EBITDA of 15%.
We are expecting an EBITDA of 25-50%, and a net profit margin of 15-30%.
We don't run at night. That's the weird part. This forces us to have extra production capacity and, to turn a profit, those production capacity need to be cheap. Fortunatly, having access to cheap electricity means that we can be somewhat wasteful and not rely on the best most efficient process (which are often capital expensive).
If you have questions, just send us an e-mail at : contact [at] alusol.fr