PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Major Rio Tinto has announced that its ELYSIS initiative successfully produced its first aluminium without any direct greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions at its Industrial Research and Development Center in Saguenay, Canada.

ELYSIS is a joint venture (JV) led by Rio and aluminium major Alcoa, that is working to commercialise a new technology to make aluminum that eliminates all direct GHGs from the traditional smelting process and instead produces oxygen.

As part of its technology development and scale-up, ELYSIS will install industrial inert anode prototype cells at the end of an existing potline at Rio’s Alma smelter to demonstrate the technology’s effectiveness at a commercial scale in an industrial operating environment.

The inert anode prototype cells will operate on a commercial scale typical for large modern aluminium smelters, using an electrical current of 450 kiloamperes.

Rio said this week that the production of aluminium at the ELYSIS Industrial Research and Development Center marks the achievement of a significant milestone, using a full industrial design at a size comparable to small smelting cells operating in the industry today.

“This is a significant step in reinventing the aluminium smelting process which is well over 100 years old. It will help address the paradox that aluminium is a material that is critical for the decarbonisation of the world, but also currently one that is very carbon intensive to produce,” said Rio aluminium CEO Ivan Vella.

“Rio Tinto looks forward to bringing this breakthrough zero carbon technology to the market and supplying our customers with the green aluminium they are expecting.”

Alcoa executive VP and chief innovation officer Ben Kahrs said that the company was working to transform the aluminum industry, and the ELYSIS technology was an important component in its overall strategy to advance sustainably.

“We are very proud to see Alcoa’s early work to develop the inert anode technology move forward with the ELYSIS JV, which is working to revolutionise the aluminum industry. Today’s announcement takes this process another step closer to full commercialisation with packages available for sale in 2024 and then industrial applications to follow.”

Work is now focused on accelerating the scale-up of the ELYSIS technology towards the demonstration of even larger commercial-size cells in 2023. 

Construction of these prototype cells is now well underway at the end of an existing potline at Rio’s Alma smelter. The industrial cells are designed to be used as a ‘drop-in’ replacement to retrofit existing smelters or build new ones and can be scalable to size as needed.

With the current development pathway, ELYSIS aims to have its technology available for installation from 2024 and the production of larger volumes of carbon-free aluminium about two years later.