India's Nalco Seeks Partner for Cathode-Manufacturing Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--India's National Aluminium Company Limited (BSE:532234) (Nalco) (Bhubaneswar, Orissa) is seeking a joint venture partner to construct a 5,000-ton-per-year graphitized cathode carbon block plant. Nalco is willing to pick up a 26% to 40% equity stake in this joint venture.

A pre-condition for selection of a partner is that the latter should have experience of running a graphitized carbon cathode plant with a capacity of at least 4,000 tons per year for three years.

Graphitized carbon cathode block is a critical input in smelting copper and aluminum, steel blast furnaces and the manufacturing of automotive batteries. Nalco currently imports its entire yearly requirement of 2,600 tons of cathode block for its smelters, which produce 3.45 tons per year of aluminum. The captive requirement of cathode block will increase to 4,000 tons per year by 2012 on completion of the expansion. Aluminum production will increase to 4.6 tons per year.

According to company officials, Nalco is upgrading technical specifications of its smelters in terms of amperage from 180 kiloamps to 220 kiloamps that would require only 100% graphitized carbon cathode blocks. Nalco's planned overseas investments for aluminum smelting in Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia and South Africa would use 300- to 500-kiloamp smelting technology. The proposed cathode-manufacturing plant should have the flexibility to supply to all these specifications.

The location of the proposed cathode plant will depend on the availability of raw materials such as calcined petroleum coke and coal tar pitch. Nalco has planned a coal tar pitch manufacturing plant for captive consumption with a joint venture partner.

Nalco has signed an agreement with the Indonesian government to construct a 500,000-ton aluminum plant and a 1,250-megawatt captive power plant, entailing an investment of $3.6 billion. The company has also signed a similar agreement with the Iranian government for a $2 billion aluminum plant with a capacity of 3.3 tons per year. The planned cathode plant will supply smelter inputs to these projects.

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