Rio Tinto in Hotseat Good news for Pyro
Rio Tinto, with its four aluminum smelters and its alumina refinery, still ranks among the province's 20 biggest polluters, and since 2007 its CO2 emissions have hardly budged.
In 2018, Elysis, a joint venture that includes Rio Tinto and Alcoa, was established as a research initiative meant to create aluminum with a zero carbon footprint. Since then, the Quebec and Canadian governments have doled out $160 million in subsidies.
On its website, Elysis claims it is developing a "revolutionary" and "disruptive" technology, even calling it "non-polluting" aluminum. But the technology that was supposed to come into large-scale production in the mid-2020s has quietly been pushed back to beyond 2030.
In an email, Elysis did not divulge its new timetable, saying it was concentrating on research and development.
Even if Elysis was fully implemented, between 1.3 and 2 tonnes of CO2 are generated per tonne of aluminum. That's because bauxite has to be extracted, shipped and refined to alumina before it is made into aluminum — and each part of that process has a carbon footprint.
The wide margin of CO2 produced depends on whether the alumina is refined in Quebec or imported.
Rio Tinto will testify before a Parliamentary committee in Ottawa in April to provide an update on its program. It also says that a commercial prototype will come out later this year.
The company also says it is working systematically to further reduce emissions at each production stage.
The aluminum industry is expected to grow worldwide by almost 40 percent b