Alcoa Corp. unveiled a technology roadmap to support the company’s vision to reinvent the aluminum industry for a sustainable future. The technologies in Alcoa’s roadmap, including a proprietary post-consumer scrap-recycling process, have the potential to decarbonize a significant portion of the upstream aluminum supply chain. The roadmap includes three key programs: the Refinery of the Future, the ASTRAEA metal purification process and ELYSIS joint-venture technology.

The Refinery of the Future aims to both reduce the capital cost of developing a refinery and enable decarbonization of the alumina refining process. Alcoa would use a combination of processes and technologies that are under development, including mechanical vapor recompression and electric calcination to develop this future-focused design.

The ASTRAEA metal purification process was developed by Alcoa for recycling post-consumer aluminum scrap into high-purity aluminum. The process could create an entirely new value chain to economically produce aluminum of a quality that far exceeds the purity of the commercial-grade aluminum produced in a smelter.

ELYSIS joint-venture technology eliminates all greenhouse gases from the traditional smelting process. The process uses next-generation electrode design and proprietary materials first developed at the Alcoa Technical Center and emits pure oxygen as a byproduct at a lower operating and capital cost than conventional technology.

The technology roadmap also helps support Alcoa’s pathway to reaching its ambition to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 across its global operations, including Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Learn more about the Pittsburgh-based company’s roadmap here.