Producer has agreements with Indonesia and Colombia for smelter technology transfer
Emirates Global Aluminium, the largest industrial company in the United Arab Emirates outside oil and gas, recently announced the start-up of the first section of an expansion to the company’s Al Taweelah smelter, the company stated in a press communique.
The 26 new reduction cells at potline 1 at Al Taweelah will now ramp-up to produce some 30,000 tonnes of aluminium per year.
In total EGA is building 66 new reduction cells to extend all three potlines at Al Taweelah. The project will increase production capacity at Al Taweelah by some 78,000 tonnes of hot metal per year. The start-up of the extension to potline 2 and then potline 3 will take place later this year.
Overall project completion stands at 70 per cent, on schedule despite the challenges of the pandemic.
“This project to expand our production at Al Taweelah is part of our ongoing debottlenecking of production and investment in high return growth opportunities,” explained Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, CEO, EGA.
Some 950 people are currently working on the Al Taweelah smelter expansion project, with over 2.1 million hours of work completed so far with a world-class safety performance. There have been zero injuries leading to time off work.
EGA has early stage agreements with companies in both Indonesia and Colombia that could lead to exports of EGA technology to build aluminium smelters.
The start-up of the 26 new reduction cells takes EGA’s total number of reduction cells in both Jebel Ali to Al Taweelah to 2,803. EGA makes one-in-every 25 tonnes of aluminium produced worldwide, and is the largest ‘premium aluminium’ producer.
