Aluminum the last metal

By Ian Page – 2021.11.15

I'm getting a little frustrated that every time I find what seems to be a critical resource for the future, China seems to own it!  There are a number of places where aluminum can replace steel or copper in large quantities (warships isn't one of them as the US proves regularly) e.g. HVDC long distance cables, and EV bodies, so I wanted to know where it was coming from.

China is by far the largest producer of aluminum
 

The raw material for aluminum is alumina from one of several geological types, The most accessible for Europe is Guinea. China can easily access the other two large sources Australia and Vietnam, even though it has very limited actual reserves itself.

 
Aluminum is very highly recycled, and since the other main input to aluminum is energy (aluminum is referred to as solid energy because it takes so much), cheap energy is a key determinant of where it's made. Recycling involves much less energy and should thus be cheaper. Thus, one would expect recycling to happen in countries where aluminum is imported as products, and then becomes the basis of a local aluminum product industry, rather than having the cost of transporting the aluminum containing products back to china for reprocessing.

China uses mainly coal, which is bad. 

In future aluminum can be made using entirely renewable energy and with non-carbon electrodes for reduction with hydrogen. The process can also handle a certain amount of variation in the energy inputs over time sol partially tolerates raw renewable energy

Peak aluminum

I can’t find anything on this. The (inappropriate) R/P ratio is about 100, which suggests there is 100 years supply, but I have no visibility of the resource’s triangle shape. My guess based on the geological source nature is that it’s pretty flat while bauxite lasts which suggests that there might actually be a significant amount before prices start escalations. 

A key question is whether aluminum demand will flatten out as it completes its substitution of other metals. If it does the high recyclability suggests that extraction will become a small part of the material input. If aluminum is merely at the start of a long substitution curve to be the only metal left in CHON, then it will portably need to access much more expensive ad energy intensive sources of aluminum (which are many)

There's lots to find out here.