Conference Agenda

Aluminium Dunkerque (AD) benefits from the low carbon footprint of the French electricity grid and the continual improvement of its smelting technology, which places AD in the top quartile worldwide for carbon emissions (scope 1 & 2). Building on this enviable position, AD revealed in 2023 its decarbonization strategy, which aims to halve its emissions by 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. To achieve this, Aluminium Dunkerque has formed partnerships with other entities to prepare and implement this ambitious plan.

As early as 2017, along with other industrial companies from the Dunkirk port hub, it helped found the "Industry, Carbone and Territory" committee (now DKarbonation), which was established to engage with local, regional, and national public authorities in a platform for exchange and innovation with a view to decarbonizing this industrial territory. This initiative has since been recognized as France's first Low-Carbon Industrial Zone.

Subsequently, with the support of long-standing partners, members of Aluminium France, AD has initiated the acceleration phase of its decarbonization roadmap, the design of a solution for pre-concentrating and capturing CO2 in pot flue gases, specifically tailored to the aluminium smelting technology.

Finally, AD is also forging partnerships with international companies active in the transport and long-term storage of CO2, with a view to preparing the scaling-up of this CCS solution and being able to share the costs associated with the transport and the storage of the captured carbon at various sites below the North Sea.

Aluminium Dunkerque is convinced that success in these innovative and capital-intensive fields can only be achieved by building ad hoc, solid, and ambitious partnerships.

It has been now 10 years since the German family-owned aluminium producer TRIMET took over the historical French production sites of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and Castelsarrasin from Rio Tinto.

Throughout this period, a strong industrial plan has been executed and over 200 million euros have been invested in increasing potroom production and recycling, diversifying casthouse products, reducing logistic costs, improving environmental footprint, energy efficiency, electrical consumption flexibility and operational performance.

At the same time, a solid human resources development plan has been implemented, with 480 new recruits over the period including 160 new positions, the creation of an in-house apprentices program, and a particular focus on safety and job training.

The strong and consistent actions taken over the last 10 years have allowed to put both sites on the track of long-term sustainability and have enabled them to successfully deal with the multiple crisis that have arisen during the period.

The Gardanne plant was the cradle of the bauxite-to-alumina refining industry through the Bayer process, 130 years ago. Throughout its industrial and entrepreneurial history, the plant has consistently reinvented itself to meet the structural and conjunctural challenges faced.

The company has been able to modernize its plant and increase its alumina production in line with growing demand from the Second World War until the 1970s. Then from this period energy costs became a major issue with the oil crises and more recently, the consequences of the war in Ukraine. The Gardanne operating configuration has been revisited several times to change its energy supply mix and its energy production and to adapt its processes (evaporation and digestion).

With the evolution of regulations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) challenges, taking environmental constraints into account has become an issue of survival. Innovative solutions have been implemented to meet environmental constraints, such as water consumption and wastewater quality, control of dust emissions and atmospheric discharges and particularly on bauxite residue management.

Regarding CO2 emissions, the site launched a major - and much-acclaimed – reduction plan for its entire process in 2022, proposing innovative solutions to improve energy efficiency and increase the proportion of electrical energy.

Finally, the Gardanne plant has successfully implemented a new business model for higher value-added specialty alumina, and production facilities have been modernized to realise this.

This transformation has been underway for the past two decades and has accelerated since the cessation of bauxite refining in 2021 and the transformation of its Bayer process.

The oldest active alumina plant in the world, Gardanne has 130 years’ experience of adaptation.

In aluminium R&D and technology, our focus over recent decades has been on productivity (volume and cost) and HSE. Today, these areas remain important and are in reality even more complex to improve as we have already made the easiest steps! However new objectives have been added centred on finding better ways to provide the aluminium the world needs while reducing our carbon footprint and to make net zero a reality. To meet these new objectives as quickly as possible, we must work in a different way. Key to this, it means adapting our R&D and technology portfolio, moving faster, working with external technologies and being more ambitious and bolder.

Continuous improvement and innovation are part of our DNA, in Rio Tinto. So, in response to this new context, Rio Tinto put in place a global organization based on one hand on the strong existing know-how and skills of the R&D teams and on the other hand, a more centralised organization giving support to its various products groups. This organization aims to be more efficient and will enable us to find and adopt technologies which are no longer in-house technologies, to find the right partnerships (from labs to industrial companies), and to go quicker from the idea to the implementation in operational sites.

More specifically, in Rio Tinto Aluminium, we have a rich experience in both R&D development and the industrialization process, thanks to our technology sales history and our vivid connection with our smelters. We also benefit from a large and rich eco-system. This paper shows how we are leveraging this already strong base to go further and faster while improving our organization.

Panel discussion following the presentations