Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), which recently completed its Potline 5 expansion, plans another expansion, but formal approval will be granted only after a natural gas deal between Bahrain and Qatar takes effect.

Alba’s management had indicated several months ago that it was looking at a 300,000-tonne expansion, around the same as the increase that Potline 5 fetched.
Potline 6 will bring aluminium production to unprecedented new heights, said Alba’s chief executive for operations, Mahmoud Al Daylami.
“Alba products hopefully will reach new markets, particularly in the EU, despite a 6 per cent tax levied on aluminium imports,” he said, adding that negotiations were under way to reduce entry fees to the EU market.
Alba broke a world record when it recently completed its commissioning phase in just 77 days. It is the largest smelter in the world outside Eastern Europe.
The smelter’s annual production will grow by over 310,000 tonnes per year (tpy) to a total output of 840,000 tpy.
Production in 2004 was 530,000 tonnes of high-grade aluminium. In the previous year the company had produced 527,000 tonnes.
Alba has been able to meet stringent market demands worldwide with consistent metal purity levels at 99.88 per cent. Its aluminium was used to build the Mars explorer Sojourner.
The company’s ongoing success has also spawned a thriving downstream industry in Bahrain and provided training and job opportunities for the national workforce. Approximately half of Alba’s metal is currently supplied to local downstream industries and the rest is exported to more than 25 countries with the Far East receiving about 20 per cent, other GCC countries receiving about 18 per cent   and Southeast Asia 7 per cent.
Having commissioned Potline 5, Alba took steps to implement a number of improvements over which it will spend $11.4 million.
The projects include installing modern switchgear to meet the latest environmental standards and an oil regeneration plant to improve efficiency, reduce waste generation and recycle oil used in its power transformers.
Plans to study a further expansion of the Alba calcining plant and a potential investment in a new alumina refinery project have been approved.
Alba recently installed what could be the most comprehensive automated emission-monitoring system ever to have been commissioned at an aluminium smelter.
The sophisticated system continuously monitors emissions from the pot rooms and uses wireless technology to automatically transmit real time data to the Fume Treatment Plant control rooms. The data is then analysed and if emission levels even threaten to increase, corrective action can be taken to pre-empt any damage. This, in turn, helps ensure that emission levels at Alba remain at all times below international permissible levels.
High-tech sensors, deployed at strategic points along each pot room are interconnected and broadcast the data they collect over a secure wireless network to a dedicated computer system. The data, which is collected around the clock, is analysed as it is received and the results can be provided to virtually any PC within Alba.
The system stores all data recorded and can generate detailed reports for any period of time.