Aluminium Bahrain has set two milestones, one in production and the other in safety, the smelter reported.

The casthouse team, led by the manager of casthouse operations, Abdul Rasool, and superintendent Arif Noor, exceeded the planned production target of 110,000 tonnes per year (tpy) of slabs, going 25,000 tonnes better to notch up a total of 135,000 tpy.

On the safety front, the Calciner and Marine recently succeeded in achieving 1.5 million work hours without a single lost time injury.

To put this in perspective, the Calciner and Marine’s achievement amounts to an accident-free work environment for a total of five years.

Commenting on the production achievement, Alba said its drive towards lean transformation and global competitiveness was yielding results with the company beginning to record new production milestones that set new standards in quality, safety and cost savings.

The new production figure was achieved without any loss of quality and without any compromise to safety, it said.

The Casthouse also produced 250 tonnes of slabs in a single shift, far exceeding the average production figures per shift that revolve around 100 to 150 tonnes.  

Alba chief executive Laurent Schmitt and chief operations officer Mohammed Mahmood congratulated the Cathouse team.

Safety milestone

“Alba has regularly enforced rigorous safety standards throughout the plant, and these have earned the company global accolades such as the prestigious safety and occupational health awards from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and the British Safety Council that Alba has won for three consecutive years,” it said. 

Alba is one of the very few smelters in the world that has its own calciner plant. It is the first of its kind in the Middle East.   

Commenting on the Calciner and Marine’s record achievement, Schmitt said: “Alba greatly values safety as an integral component of its operations, and is committed towards making safety a state of mind.”

He congratulated Mohammed Shuja, the manager of Calciner and Marine, and his team for having achieved the milestone.

Alba produces more than 870,000 tonnes per year of the highest grade aluminium, with products including standard and T-ingots, extrusion billets, rolling slab, propertzi ingots and molten aluminium.