Mining Impacts · impact
Smelting energy demand
Energy · During operation
- Category
- Energy
- Timescale
- During operation
Mitigation
Siting on low-carbon grids, inert anodes and process improvements, and recycling — remelting aluminium takes a small fraction of the energy of making it from ore.
Mechanism
Pulling a metal out of its compound takes at least the energy that bound it, and often much more. Aluminium is the extreme case: Hall–Héroult electrolysis uses roughly 13–15 kWh of electricity per kilogram of metal, which is why smelters are built where power is cheap rather than where the ore is.
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