Alcan 50% Complete with Construction of Spent Potliner Recycling Plant in Quebec

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Alcan Incorporated (NYSE:AL ) (Montreal, Quebec) is 50% complete with construction of a $161 million spent potliner recycling plant in Jonquiere, Quebec. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be complete by mid-2008. Alcan is utilizing BPR-Bechtel (Montreal, Quebec) to provide engineering services for the project. BPR-Bechtel is 90% complete with engineering. The buildings on the site are nearing completion along with the installation of tanks, silos and pumps. Next will be the installation of the grinding section, followed by the instrumentation and electrical systems.

The new plant will be a full-scale pilot plant, able to process 80,000 metric tons per year of spent potliners from Alcan’s aluminum smelters in Quebec, as well as the Kittimat, British Columbia smelter and smelters in the U.S. The new plant will test Alcan’s new Low Caustic Leaching & Lime technology developed at the company’s Arvida Research and Development Center.

Spent potliners are a waste product of the aluminum smelting process. The electrolytic cells or “pots” are lined with insulating refractory bricks and carbon blocks. Throughout the electrolytic process, this lining absorbs a certain amount of the electrolyte's components and must be replaced every three to eight years depending on the campaign life of the refractory. As a corrosive hazardous material containing leachable fluorides and cyanides, spent potliners are removed and stored at a landfill or other site designed specifically for this purpose, and at much cost to Alcan. Alcan has been storing spent potliners at its site in Jonquière since 1980.

The SPL processing plant will be comprised of the following buildings: a storage building for potlining containers; a building for the crushing process, including six storage silos for the crushed pot lining; a building for the LCLL process (a wet process); this building will contain all the leaching circuits, filtration, cyanide disposal, evaporation, and crystallization equipment. It will also contain storage space for reagents (sulfuric acid, caustic soda solution, coagulants), a control room, a laboratory, and a maintenance shop.

Industrial Info first reported on this project as part of its North American Industrial Database in May of 1998, when it was in site study.

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