BLACK CHINA BLOG

This was the view of a leading Chinese academic, Wang Tao, when I interviewed him about the new “inti-petcoke” law in China. Mr Wang, from the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy was talking about the potential impact on the international aluminium community, if China were to stop or reduce exports of low sulphur petcoke. Mr […]

Last month at the China Aluminium Forum, I predicted that the SHFE would broach the RMB10,000 mark. In some senses it wasn’t a bold prediction, since the price was hovering at that time around the RMB10,500 mark. But my concern was that demand was now entrenched at lower levels, but supply showed few signs […]

SAPA, the world’s largest aluminium extruder with 2.6 million tonnes capacity, has announced that one of its plants in the USA is under investigation. The allegation is employees at the plant had falsified the results of tests on metal produced at the plant. The pant in question is in Portland Oregon. According to the […]

The US Aluminum Association CEO Heidi Brock has told Reuters that China has committed to maintaining an export tax on primary aluminium, according to a story from Reuters today. Ms Brock met a deputy director general of the NDRC at the recent China Aluminium Forum in Qing Dao. China imposes a 15% export tariff on […]

In recent months, Alcoa had made two big changes. The first news is to split the company into two - an upstream company which will retain the Alcoa name, and the downstream value-add company. And yesterday, Alcoa announced that will idle three smelters in United States. Alcoa used to have five smelters in U.S. The 269Kt capacity […]

I was asked today what the net improvement in petcoke and calcined coke would be for the USA as a result of the loss of smelting capacity at the 3 Alcoa plants and the Mt Holly smelter. It’s not a difficult calculation to do. Assume a certain net carbon consumption for the 4 plants, say 440kgs/tonne […]