Aluminium Al
What it is for
Aluminium is what you use when weight matters more than cost: aircraft, vehicle bodies, packaging, transmission cable. It is also the most electricity-intensive metal in common use, to the point that a smelter is often better understood as a way of exporting electricity than as a metals business.
What it costs
Where it sits in the chain
Three stages, three different countries as a rule. Bauxite is mined in the tropics, notably Guinea and Australia. It is refined into alumina near the mine or near cheap energy. Alumina is smelted into metal wherever electricity is cheapest and most reliable, which has meant China, the Gulf, Iceland and Quebec. The reason this platform holds bauxite production but quotes an aluminium price is that they are genuinely different points in the chain, and the gap between them is the electricity.
Who has it
| Country | Production | Reserves | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 43,000 | 680,000 | 2024 |
| India | 4,200 | 650,000 | 2024 |
| Russian Federation | 3,800 | 480,000 | 2024 |
| Canada | 3,300 | — | 2024 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2,700 | — | 2024 |
| Bahrain | 1,600 | — | 2024 |
| Australia | 1,500 | 3,500,000 | 2024 |
| Norway | 1,300 | — | 2024 |
| Brazil | 1,100 | 2,700,000 | 2024 |
| Malaysia | 870 | — | 2024 |
Smelter production of aluminium metal in thousand tonnes; reserves are bauxite ore, a different substance at an earlier stage. Price in US dollars per tonne of metal.
How concentrated it is
The two halves of this chain concentrate in different places, and the page can now show both. Bauxite mining sits with Australia, Guinea and China; smelting sits with China and then with the countries that have cheap, reliable electricity. Reading the reserve column against the production column here means reading ore against metal, which is the point rather than a flaw: the gap between where the rock is and where the metal is made is the electricity, and it is the most important fact about aluminium.
What this cannot show
Do not divide one column by the other. Roughly four tonnes of bauxite yield two of alumina and one of metal, and the ratio varies by ore, so the reserve figure and the production figure are in different substances. The alumina refining stage between them is not carried here at all.
Other resources
Copper · Lithium · Cobalt · Nickel · Potash · Phosphate · Iron ore · Zinc · Tin