The Roll of Bauxite and Alumina in Iran’s Primary Aluminium Business

Aluminium industry has found its place in Iran, a country with huge reserves of natural gas, a reliable source for primary aluminium production as the most energy-intensive industry based on per tonne of the production and the big volume produced globally, around 58 million tonnes per year (2015). Nevertheless, the low availability and quality of Iran’s local bauxite reserves as the main mineral ore for primary production of aluminium has always been a cause for concern for this section’s development decision-makers. Iran regional climatic characteristics are not considered appropriate to bear high-quality sufficient bauxite resources for being processed viably and economically into alumina, a white powder extracted from bauxite in refineries and fed into aluminium smelting reduction pots directly. In the current paper, this challenge with bauxite is more explicitly explained to see its real impression on Iranian primary aluminium industry and the future development projects considering the country’s 2025 Vision plan to rise the current 487-ktonne primary metal capacity to 1500 ktonnes, more than three times of augmentation. IMIDROas Iran’s biggest mining and mineral industries state holding organization and as the body in charge of capital-intensive industries development, like aluminium smelters with more than 1 billion dollars of investment, has defined solutions for the aluminium industry raw mateprials’ supply. In this paper, it will be discussed why today’s aluminium smelting development is not anymore dependant on proximity to bauxite mines. Furthermore, the change in the aluminium business structure globally since 40 years ago till now has been investigated from bauxite and alumina perspective andthe repercussions of such an evolution on Iranian aluminium industry as well as our future development plans are being explained.

Keywords:

primary aluminium , bauxite , alumina refinery , IMIDRO