Kurri-Kurri aluminum smelter

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The Kurri Kurri Aluminum Smelter took in 1969 at Kurri Kurri , a town in the Hunter Region in New South Wales , Australia , its aluminum production to. The smelter has been operated with an annual capacity of 180,000 tons of aluminum by Kurri Kurri Pty Limited since 2002, when it was taken over 100 percent from VAW aluminum AG by the globally active Norwegian concern Hydro Aluminum Group .

In 2005, Hydro Aluminum invested AUD 40 million to modernize the aluminum smelter's facilities , while minimizing pollutant emissions and increasing the capacity by 6,000 tons of aluminum.

Aluminum smelters are large-scale industrial plants that use smelting electrolysis to produce aluminum from aluminum oxide using a lot of energy . In the Hall-Héroult process , pure aluminum is obtained from aluminum oxide using fused- salt electrolysis. Here, aluminum oxide with a melting temperature of 2045 ° C is mixed with cryolite in order to lower the melting temperature. In this process, the melting temperature can be lowered to 950 ° C, which enables electrolysis. This aluminum smelter, like all smelters of this type, is in operation 365 days and cannot be completely switched off and restarted at a later point in time.

After one of the plant's three production lines had already been shut down in January 2012, Norsk Hydro ASA announced the closure of the Kurri Kurri smelter in June 2012 against the background of a global overcapacity of primary aluminum and a strong Australian dollar, which has long suffered the profitability of the plant would have.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ hydro.com : Kurri Kurri , in English, accessed 13 April 2012
  2. ↑ aluminum.org.au ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Kurri Kurri Pty Limited , accessed April 13, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / aluminum.org.au

Coordinates: 32 ° 47 ′ 23 "  S , 151 ° 28 ′ 43.4"  E