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OT: Plebiscite 24-Jun-2011 At 6:46:57 PM evanbb

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On 24/06/2011 harold wrote:
>If we shut down the aluminium industry what will you use to make caribiners
>or aircraft out of. Or if you just shift production overseas, what is
>the benefit/difference???

There are a few factors at work here. Australia does almost no aluminium manufacturing; we just use cheap coal energy to extract aluminium from bauxite. This is the most energy intensive step of the process by some margin. It is the same story all over the world with aluminium; countries with very, very cheap energy get the aluminium smelters.

Australia has the highest emissions intensity in the world for electricity generation. That means in emissions terms, Australia is the worst place in the world to make aluminium. I would favour any solution that moved aluminium smelting to lower emitting sources of electricity. An alternative is to get serious about geothermal energy in the Cooper basin and move resource processing there. This is proposed by Flannery in one of the quarterly essays. He gets a bit carried away and proposes a city in the desert called Geothermia, but I think he's on drugs.