Aluminum Reduction plant vs. Smelting.

On 9/3/2012 1:22 AM, jimpdavis wrote: Are you referring to a bauxite to aluminum reduction plant or just a casting plant? sometimes they plants shut down simply because the bauxite supply nearby plays out, or the power and other costs change for the worse. They operate in a mode also of having to have casting orders in for the output of their operations because they can't really easily turn them off. When they have extra metal they have hot they have to put it somewhere, and what they used to do with it if they had to was cast it into 50 to 100 ton pigs and ship them elsewhere. However when they surrendered the energy that it took to keep it molten, it was a loss. Usually they didn't use that metal once it was cooled. I've visited both a plant in South Carolina, Alumax, and one east of Evansville, In, Alcoa, both which still have good supplies of cheap power and ore. I assume even if they were to have had the situation where they don't have direct orders and are shipping to China, the Chinese and foreign buyers would be taking the metal from plants here, simply because we have fairly cheap power. Indiana is coal, near fairly large open face mines and the one in North Carolina gets about 1/2 of a hydro plant in Georgia. Thought I'd ask as I don't have much idea of how the west coast plants are doing. It could be that the plants were displaced which sucks for localities, but hopefully it is still cheaper to process the ore here and have some jobs, rather than shipping raw materials only and getting zippo for loosing our natural resources. I guess the Chinese are waking up about rare earths now and have been on to what they have there. I know the non US members of the list probably have different views, and am aware of all of the resource export that goes on, especially in Africa. I have not seen any quantitative comparison of how iron in the steel has changed, but there are a lot of mini-mills which have replaced a lot of the original plant complexes which went ore->steel, but I don't know that we need them with all the recycling. Also minimills near your location are cheaper than central plants shipping material. This is a bit away from computers, but not so much if you also look at how things are moving around these days with IC and hardware production. We are well into the 10 year old rule covering a lot of equipment which is highly integrated, and not something you get that has general purpose parts. I'm not even sure where we are going with things in the last 10 years all starting to either be small equipment, and larger systems being destroyed by the owners due to IP concerns and other reasons. as things have evolved all manner of things are now pretty caught up being commodities and subject to being moved around the world. jim