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Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry
Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry
Theodore Shabad
The Soviet
Union
hydro-electric
possesses
power sites
attractive reduction
for
capacity,
supplied
with
bauxite
but
for
the
notably
nepheline in recent
and
alunite,
years,
and
aluminium
planners
increasing
preference
bauxite
and
much
as 40%
an unusual
sources Future
are demonstrated
by the
expansion
of earlier of
production, Sea
coast
based
construction plant
and
of
on the
proposals
seaboard coast,
plans for an
non-bauxite
the
alumina
Pacific
to become
metal.
abandonment
second
from
indicating ore
strategic
intentions
as
aluminium
materials,
on foreign
this
of
1975
derived
willingness
dependent
large
By
of Soviet
raw
an
for imports
was
imported
has
Soviet
have shown
alumina.
production
poorly
use of nonmaterials,
domestic
waned
is
domestic An early
resources.
bauxitic
for
aluminium
high-grade
enthusiasm
in
providing
Siberia,
southern
a huge
potential
for
plant
both
using
a
Black
on
a the
imported
bauxite. The
author
editor
is
Geography:
Review
a
translation
monthly
author of
the
of
Soviet
Translation, journal,
and
of Basic
Industrial
Resources
USSR
(Columbia
University
Press, 1969).
222
and
The Soviet Union, generally presumed to be one of the major potential purveyors of mineral raw materials to the world economy, is poorly endowed with resources for one of its rapidly growing industries - aluminium. Despite an intensive geological prospecting effort over the years, identified exploitable reserves of high-grade bauxite remain limited. The nation’s economic planners have sought to overcome the domestic bauxite shortage in two ways: first by pioneering the use of non-bauxite raw materials, such as nepheline and alunite, which are not used elsewhere in the commercial production of alumina, the intermediate product of aluminium processing; secondly by steadily increasing imports of both bauxite and alumina from a wide range of foreign suppliers. In 1975, out of a national aluminium metal output estimated at 2.4 x lo6 tonnes, only 37% was derived from domestic bauxite resources, with 23% coming from non-bauxitic materials and 40% from imported raw materials. There has been growing evidence in the Soviet press and technical literature that Moscow planners have become disenchanted with the technical problems and the economics of using the non-bauxitic materials, once widely publicised as the potential solution to the Soviet Union’s raw material problems in the aluminium industry. No expansion of non-bauxitic projects appears to be planned and, in fact, an alunite-based alumina plant is being expanded partly for the use of imported bauxite. The outlook is therefore for growing reliance on imported raw materials for an expanding aluminium industry as the vast hydro-electric potential of south-central Siberia is being realised.
Historical development From the time its aluminium industry began in 1933, the Soviet Union has become the world’s second largest producer of aluminium metal, with an annual output of 2.4 x lo6 tonnes. This is about half of normal United States output and twice the level of the world’s third producing nation, Japan (see Table 1). The Soviet industry had its beginnings in northwest European Russia, where a small aluminium plant, with a designed capacity of
RESOURCES
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1976
Raw materialproblems of the Soviet aluminium industry Table 1. Principal aluminium
Source:
Central
Handbook Publication 1976,
Intelligence
Agency,
of Economic Statistics 1976, ER 76-10481, September
p 99.
United States Soviet Union Japan Canada West Germany Norway France China United Kingdom Australia Spain Rumania *I974
’ For a detailed account of the Soviet aluminium industry up to the late 1950s. see T. Shabad. The Soviet Aluminium industry, American Metal Market, New York, 1958, 25 pp, and a supplement Soviet Aluminium Development in 1959, American Metal Market, New York, 1960. 22 pp. For developments during the 1960s. see T. Shabad, Basic industrial Resources of the USSR, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, pp. 58-63 and elsewhere under individual projects.
RESQURCES
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December
producing
countries
(thousand
tonnes)
1965
1970
1975
2499 1000 294 753 234 276 340 115 36 88 52 -
3607 1700 733 962 309 522 381 220 40 168 120 107
3519 2450 1016 878 678 590 383 320’ 308 223 210 204
estimate
1 I 000 tonnes went on stream in 1932 at Volkhov near Leningrad, using low-grade bauxite from a nearby deposit at Boksitogorsk and power from a small local hydro-electric station. The Volkhov plant was followed in 1933 by the opening of a 36 OOO-tonne reduction plant a Zaporozh’ye at a new Dnieper River hydro-electric station in the Ukraine. Alumina was at first derived from bauxite at the two reduction plants and, as requirements expanded, from an additional alumina plant opened in 1938 at the Boksitogorsk mine itself.’ The discovery of bauxite resources in the Urals, of higher grade than the Boksitogorsk deposit, led to the growth of the aluminium industry in the Urals, starting in the mid-1930s. This eastward trend was accelerated during World War II by the loss of the aluminium capacity in the European part of the country under German occupation. The first combined alumina and aluminium plant in the Urals opened in 1939 at Kamensk. During the war, some equipment could be evacuated from the threatened plants at Zaporozh’ye and Volkhov and was installed in a new aluminium plant built at Stalinsk (now Novokuznetsk), put in operation in 1943 in Siberia’s Kuznetsk Basin, and in a second combined alumina (1943) and aluminium plant (1945) in the Urals, at Krasnoturinsk, not far from the North Urals bauxite centre of Severoural’sk. As a result of these projects, Soviet aluminium production rose during World War II from 60 000 tonnes in 1940 to about 85 000 tonnes in 1945, despite the loss of the plants in the European part of the USSR. After the war, expansion of aluminium capacity resumed at first in the European part of the country, based both on domestic bauxite and on some bauxite imports that came initially from Hungary and later from Greece. Aside from the reconstruction of the two prewar plants, at Volkhov and Zaporozh’ye, five new aluminium reduction plants were put into operation during the 1950s. Two became part of the northwest cluster of the industry, with the Kandalaksha plant on the Kola Peninsula opened in 1951 and the Nadvoitsy plant in Karelia put in operation in 1954. Two others became part of a southwest cluster in Transcaucasia, with the Yerevan plant in Armenia starting in 1950 and the Sumgait plant near Baku in Azerbaijan in 1955. The fifth and then largest reduction plant (with a capacity of about 200 000 tonnes of metal) went on stream in 1959 at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), on the site of a new Volga River hydro-electric station. This expansion programme, still based largely on domestic bauxite
1976
223
Raw malerialproblems @he Soviet aluminium industry
224
RESOURCES POLICY December1976
Rawmaterialproblems
oj’the Soviet aluminium industry
resources, raised primary aluminium production from about 155 000 tonnes in 1950 to 430 000 in 1955 and about 550 000 tonnes in 1960. In the 1960s a new phase in the Soviet aluminium industry began as the development of the huge hydro-electric potential on the Angara and Yenisey rivers in south-central Siberia attracted large new aluminium reduction capacity. The rapid expansion of the industry generated raw-material demands that could no longer be met from traditional bauxite sources, and stimulated a search for additional domestic bauxite, even if of low grade; the expansion also led to the use of non-bauxitic materials and, beginning in the mid-1960s, a greatly expanded raw-material import programme. Three new plants opened production in Siberia during the 196Os, each associated with a major hydroelectric station. They were opened at Shelekhov (near Irkutsk) in 1962, at Krasnoyarsk in 1964, and at Bratsk in 1966. A fourth, associated with the Sayan hydro-electric station under construction on the Yenisey at Sayanogorsk is to go on stream in 1978. The only new plant outside Siberia is the Regar plant, which went into operation in April 1975 in the Tadzhik Republic of Central Asia, using power from the Nurek hydro-electric station.* This pronounced eastward shift of aluminium capacity raised Soviet production to about 1 million tonnes in 1965, with 35% coming from Siberia; 1.7 million in 1970, with about 50% from Siberia: and 2.4 million in 1975, with about 65% from Siberia. The new five-year plan (1976-80) has set an increase of 20-30% in aluminium production, or at least 2.9 million tonnes by 1980. This increase will come from the installation of the final production units at Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk, additional units at Regar and the first units at the new Sayanogorsk plant.3 2 Pravda, 27 April 1975. The first stage, with four potlines. may have produced about 50 000 tonnes of aluminium in 1975. The five-year plan 1976-80 calls for a production growth of 560%. Pravda, 6 January 1976, with the addition of one potline planned for 1977, three for 1978 and three more for the 1979-80 period, Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, No 4 1976. 3 The Soviet Union does not publish official production statistics for the aluminium industry. Western estimates vary widely, with a series published by the US Bureau of Mines for primary metal output running at about 70% of the production level of a series published by the Central Intelligence Agency. The Bureau of Mines fiaure for 1970 was 1’ 1 million tonnes, M&era/ Yearbook 1972, Vol III: Area reports: International, Washington, 1974, p 817. The CIA figure for 1970 was 1.7 million tonnes, Handbook of Economic Statistics 1975, op cit. The present author has found the CIA figures to conform more closely to the scattered indications found in the Soviet technical literature and the Soviet press. The last unit at Bratsk went on stream in July 1976, completing a capacity of 500 000 tonnes. Sovetskaya Rossiya. 17 July 1976. ’ Severo-Zapadnyy ekonomicheskiy rayon (The Northwest Economic Region) Nauka, Moscow, 1967, p 83; A.V. Darinskiy, Leningradskaya Oblast’, Leningrad, Lenizdat, 1975, p 346.
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Domestic bauxite resources The Soviet Union now mines bauxite in three areas: Boksitogorsk near Tikhvin, in the Leningrad area, Severoural’sk in the northern Urals, and Arkalyk in the Turgay area of northwest Kazakhstan. The Boksitogorsk deposit, discovered in 19 16, contained relatively small reserves of low-grade bauxite (41-48% alumina) with a high silica content (lo-20%), but it became the first Soviet source of bauxite, with modern mining operations getting under way in the early 1930s. The bauxite was converted into alumina at the Volkhov alumina-aluminium plant (commissioned in 1932) and at a local alumina plant (opened in 1938). Boksitogorsk-based alumina was the principal raw material for the northwest cluster of the Soviet aluminium industry until the early 196Os, when nepheline (a byproduct of the Kola apatite operation) became the principal resource base for the northwestern plants. By that time, the most accessible and highest grade bauxite had been depleted at Boksitogorsk and the local alumina plant was converted in 1960-65 to the production of abrasive-grade a!umina for grinding and polishing materials.4 Since that time, the Boksitogorsk bauxite mine has in effect ceased to be a significant element in the Soviet aluminium industry. The northern Urals bauxite mines at Severoural’sk, known as the Krasnaya Shapochka (Red Ridinghood) deposit, yield a high-grade ore of 53% alumina and about 4% silica that represents the Soviet Union’s principal source of domestic bauxite. The deposit was
1976
225
Raw materialproblems of the Soviet aluminium industry
5 Gornyy
zhumal, October 1974. In 1976 a shaft mine was being driven to a depth of 1250 metres at the rate of 35 to 40 metres a month. Stroitel’naya Gareta, 9 June 1976. ’ Izvestiya, 14 January 1972. ’ Severoural’sk output was close to 500 000 tonnes in 1945, (Shabad, Soviet Aluminum Developments in 1959, op tit Reference 1, p 2). Subsequent increases were reported by Soviet sources as follows: 170% in 1945-55 and 50% in 1955-65. Gornyy zhurnal, December 1967: 22% in 1965-70 and about 25% in 1970-75, Gornyy zhurnal, October 1974, yielding about 3 million tonnes in 1975. ‘The start of operations in the Ayat deposit was announced in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 5 October 1971: Lower Ashut in Sovetskaya Latviya, 6 January 1974 and Upper Ashut in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 16 August 1975. The need for a mix of ores is discussed in Narodnoye Khozyaystvo Kazakhstana, November 1970. pp 51-54. 9 Tsvetnyye Metally, August 1975; Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 23 November 1974. lo Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 2 1 November 1975, gives a bauxite increase of 50%. and the same publication, on 5 September 1976, gives 36%. The Pavlodar alumina growth (23%) is from Narodnoye Khoryaystvo Kazakhstana, June 1976.
226
discovered in 193 1, and mining operations began in 1934, when Urals bauxite began to move to the Zaporozh’ye alumina-aluminium plant, replacing the lower-grade Boksitogorsk ore at that Ukrainian plant. During World War II the Severoural’sk mining district became the Soviet Union’s main bauxite producer, forming the basis of two Urals alumina-aluminium plants, one at nearby Krasnoturinsk (alumina commissioned in 1943 and aluminium in 1945), the other at Kamensk, in the middle Urals, where a combined alumina-aluminium plant open in 1939. In the postwar period, the Urals supplied alumina to the expanding aluminium industry in the European part of the USSR and. after 1960, increasingly to the new large metal-reduction plants in Siberia. Development of the Urals reserves has been hampered by an Unlike the surface deposits of unfavourable mining geology. Boksitogorsk, most of the Urals reserves lie underground in karst limestone and have been plagued by severe flooding problems. Early mining operations were in small open pits and sloping shafts. As mining proceeded in the 1950s to greater depths below the watertable, the flooding problem became so severe that surface streams had to be diverted or their channels had to be lined with impervious materials. This river-control programme made it possible to tap deeper horizons and to start some large open pits in areas previously subject to flooding. Beginning in the 1960s several vertical shaft mines were driven to depths of 500 metres or more, and there are plans to penetrate to 1600 metres.5 The first large open-pit mine began operations in late 197 1.6 Bauxite production in the Severoural’sk district increased from close to 500 000 tonnes in 1945 to 2 million tonnes in 1965 and 3 million tonnes in 1975, accounting for about three-fourths of Soviet domestic bauxite in alumina equivalent.’ The Arkalyk bauxite deposit in northeast Kazakhstan, containing a high-silica bauxite (45-46% alumina, 12% silica), was discovered in 1946, and an open-pit operation began production in 1964, designed for an ultimate capacity of 3 million tonnes. The bauxite from Arkalyk is hauled 1120km by rail to an alumina plant with a designed capacity of 500 000 tonnes that was also put on stream in 1964. Pavlodar alumina is shipped to Siberian aluminium plants. It has become apparent in recent years that the reserves of the best bauxite in the Arkalyk area are limited (about 20 years if used at full capacity) and this has required the exploitation of inferior bauxite deposits nearby for a mix with the higher Arkalyk grades-the Lower Ashut deposit, with poorer ore, opened in 1974, and the Upper Ashut deposit in 1975. The Ayat deposit, about 400km miles northwest of Arkalyk, has been producing such inferior bauxite since 197 1.’ As a result of the deterioration of the raw-material base, the Pavlodar alumina plant has experienced operational difficulties. Because of the high-silica content of the bauxite, the plant had been designed for the combination process in which the standard Bayer process yields a red mud from which additional alumina is then extracted by the lime-soda sinter process. The inferior bauxite yielded more red mud than originally designed, upsetting the capacity ratio of the Bayer and sinter sections.9 The deterioration of the raw-material input was evident from the fact that bauxite mining in the Arkalyk district increased between 36 and 50% from 1970 to 1975 while alumina output at Pavlodar rose by only 23%.‘O Soviet authors have noted that the Pavlodar alumina plant is the only installation in the
RESOURCES
POLICY December
1976
Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry
world that is processing such low-grade aluminous raw material in large volumes, pointing out that the material would be regarded abroad as lateritic clay rather than bauxite. This author estimates that by 1975 the Pavlodar alumina plant produced about 500 000 tonnes a year. using about 2 million tonnes of the low-grade Kazakhstan bauxite, an unusually high bauxite-alumina ratio of 4: 1. Outside of the two major bauxite mining districts - the northern Urals and northwest Kazakhstan - development of the North Onega deposit (on the Onega River near Plesetsk in northern European Russia) has begun. The deposit, low-grade bauxite containing 53% Al, 0, and as much as 18.5% SiOz , was discovered in 1949, and development of a surface mine began in 1967. The bauxite lies under a water-saturated overburden, and the area of the prospective pit had to be drained before excavation could begin. After seven years of work, a 00 metre deep pit was completed and the first bauxite was extracted in 1974.” However there has been no further word about the development of the mine, and it has not been included in the published outline of the new five-year plan 1976-80. More significantly. perhaps, the Soviet Union has not announced the formal creation of an urban centre on the site of the mine. Design calculations in the 1960s concluded that North Onega bauxite would be mined more cheaply than the Arkalyk bauxite of Kazakhstan. North Onega bauxite was envisaged as a raw material source for the Boksitogorsk alumina plant (replacing the depleted local deposit) and for the Zaporozh’ye alumina-aluminium plant in the Ukraine. Ultimately a local alumina plant near the North Onega deposit had been projected. I2 However there has been no recent report on progress, and the outlook for the mining project remains in doubt. Future commercial bauxite prospects are focused on the Timan district in the Komi Autonomous Republic of northern European Russia and on the Belgorod district of central European Russia. Geological exploration in the Timan district has focused in recent years on the VezhayuVorykva deposit, 200km northwest of the town of Ukhta, where the bauxite, accessible by surface mining, contains 45-48% alumina and about 10% silica. So far identified reserves have not been adequate for commercial development.13
Nepheline
” lzvestiya. 30 June 1974; Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya, 9 July 1974. Urban planners have also designed a future city for the mining site, to be .called Severorossiysk, with an ultimate population of 100000. lzvestiya. 6 July 1976. l2 Severe-Zapadnyy ekonomicheskiy rayon, op tit Reference 4, p 80-81. l3 Sovetskava Geologiya. December 1975, pp 114-l 15 l4 I.N. Kitler and Yu. A. Layner, Nefeliny ~ kompleksnoye syr’ye alyuminiyevo y promyshlennosti (Nephelines a multicomponent raw material for the aluminium industry), Moscow, Metallurgizdat. 1962, p 3 1
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The first non-bauxitic source of alumina in the Soviet Union was the nepheline, a complex silicate of sodium, potassium and aluminium, that occurs with apatite, a calcium phosphate, in the Kirovsk district of the Kola Peninsula of northern European Russia. The mining of apatite. the principal Soviet source of phosphatic fertiliser, began in I93 1, with the nepheline component discarded as tailings in the process of apatite concentration. The possibility of using nepheline concentrate (29’?0 Al, 0,) from the tailings for the production of alumina was demonstrated experimentally in 1932, and a nepheline concentrator was built at Kirovsk in 1939.14 However, World War II intervened, and it was only after the war that the nepheline-to-alumina process was introduced commercially, first at the Volkhov aluminaaluminium plant near Leningrad, and then at a larger, new alumina plant at Pikalevo. near the old bauxite centre of Boksitogorsk. The alumina plant at Volkhov, originally based on the use of Boksitogorsk bauxite, was converted to the nepheline process in the
1976
227
Raw
material problems ofthe Soviet aluminous
15The alumina output in the northwest can be estimated both from published soda-ash production (about 260 000 tonnes in 1970) on the basis of 0.75 tonne of soda ash for every tonne of alumina nepheline-based and from published data on cement production from nepheline-based alumina plants (about 2.5 million tonnes) on the basis of 7 tonnes of cement for every tonne of alumina. 16The 1975 apatite output was given in Pravda. 20 February 1976. For the apatite-nepheline ratio see G.I. Granik, Ekonomicheskiye problemy razvitiya i proizvoditel’nykh Sil razmeshcheniya Yevropeyskogo Severa SSSR (Economic problems in the development and location of productive forces in the European North of the USSR), Moscow, Nauka. 1971, p 1 18. For the actual use of concentrate, nepheline see Ekonornicheskaya Gazeta, No 7. 1974. and Izvestiya, 29 December 1974. ‘I Stroitel’naya Gazeta, 14 May 1965: 12 April 1970: 1 January 1972.
228
industry
late 1940s and the first shipment of nepheline concentrate from Kirovsk was received in 1949. It took five years for the new technology to be mastered, and it was not completely operational until 1954. The process was judged so successful at the time that it was introduced at the new Pikalevo alumina plant, commissioned in 1959. Despite the low alumina content in nepheline (29%, compared with about 50% in high-grade bauxite), the nepheline process was judged to be economical because it yields both cement and alkalis (soda ash and potash) as byproducts. The sintering of 4-4.5 tonnes of nepheline concentrate with about twice as much limestone yields one tonne of alumina, one tonne of alkalis and about 7 tonnes of cement. The large limestone requirements and the large potential cement yield made the nepheline-limestone sinter process particularly economical in areas with large limestone resources and a nearby market for the vast cement output. The nepheline-based alumina capacity in the northwest region of the European USSR is limited to about 350 000 tonnes (about 50 000 tonnes at Volkhov and about 300 000 tonnes at Pikalevo).15 The processing capacity has limited the use of nepheline concentrate to I a5 million tonnes a year, which represents only about one-sixth of the nepheline potential of the tailings left by the apatite industry. If fully used, the mining operation in the Kola Peninsula would yield one tonne of nepheline concentrate for every 1.5 tonnes of apatite concentrate: in 1975, 15 million tonnes of apatite concentrate were produced at Kirovsk, equivalent to a potential nepheline output of 10 million tonnes.r6 The apparent cost-effectiveness of the nepheline process in the northwest, which resulted in part from the fact that the nepheline was a byproduct of a major apatite mining industry, stimulated the use of nepheline as an aluminous raw material elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Development began in the middle 1950s on two sites that appeared the most suitable: the Achinsk district of southern Siberia, which was to be the first of a series of large nepheline-based alumina plants supplying the expanding aluminium industry of Siberia, and the Razdan district of Armenia, which was to become a nepheline-based alumina source for the Transcaucasian cluster of the aluminium industry. The Achinsk project was originally designed to use nepheline from a nepheline-syenite deposit at Goryachegorsk, 150km southwest of Achinsk, and a railway to the site was completed in 1959. However, the discovery of a higher-grade deposit on the Kiya-Shaltyr River at Belogorsk, 56km farther to the southwest, disrupted the original plans. It required new engineering designs adapted to the new ore, the building of a new access railway, and the start of construction at the Belogorsk site from scratch. The shift in raw-material base delayed completion of the Achinsk plant. As a makeshift operation, the cement section of the project went on stream in 1965 on the basis of a local limestone deposit, with a capacity of 2 million tonnes of cement. Alumina production did not begin until April 1970, with the tenth and final rotary calcination kiln installed in late 197 1.” It soon became evident that the Achinsk alumina plant, with a designed capacity of 800 000 tonnes, was not working efficiently or economically. A report in the Soviet Government newspaper /zvesti_~~~in 1974 called the project a failure, saying that after 15
RESOURCES
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1976
Raw
I8 lzvestiya, 29 December 1974. I9 Tsvetnyye Metally, January 1975: June 1975: August 1975. *O The 1975 estimate for Achinsk alumina is further supported by the output announcement in Stroitel’naya Gazeta, 8 February 1976, that alumina production is scheduled to rise by 43% in the new five-year plan 1976-80, presumably to reach the designed capacity of 800 000 tonnes. *’ Kommunist, Yerevan newspaper: 28 December 1963: 13 July 1966: 22 June 1969; 16 March 1971; 3 August 1975. ” Kommunist, 7 January 1970: 3 August 1974: 4 January 1976. 23 Kommunist, 5 November 1970. 24 Kommunist, 3 August 1975. 25/zvestiya, 4 April 1967; Granik op tit Reference 16. p 120. ” Tsvetnyye Metally. June 1967; November 1969; Sovetskaya Rossiya, 2 1 March 1970. 27 Tsvetnyye Metally. June 1967: November 1969; Problemy razvitiya i razmeshcheniya proizvoditel’nykh sil Povolzh’ya (Problems of development and location of productive forces in the Volga region). Moscow, Mysl’, 1973, p 156.
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material
problems
of
the Soviet aluminium industry
years of construction the plant, ‘did not justify the hopes that had been placed in the use of nepheline in Siberia, and the output, once advertised as the cheapest alumina in the USSR, in fact turned out very expensive.‘i8 According to other Soviet accounts, only 53.5% of the plant’s capacity was being used in 1973 and the plant was expected to work profitably only in the fourth quarter of 1975. One reason for the uneconomical operation, aside from any technological problems, was the limitation of the cement market in southern Siberia. Since it was not economical to haul cement over long distances, only about one-half of the byproduct calcium silicate (the so-called belite slurry) was being used for byproduct cement at Achinsk.” By 1975, judging from a soda-ash yield of about 400 000 tonnes, the Achinsk plant was producing about 550 000 tonnes of alumina, or about twothirds of designed capacity.” The Armenia nepheline project was designed in 1958; construction began in 1960, and it is still incomplete.21 The use of the ore, from the Tezhsar nepheline-syenite deposit near Razdan, had been described by the Armenian designers as yielding not only byproduct cement, but also a wide range of chemicals (sodium and calcium metasilicates, potash, amorphous silica) enhancing the cost-effectiveness of the nepheline-alumina operation. In anticipation of the new industry, Razdan was selected as the site for Armenia’s largest power generating complex. It consists of a 300MW heat and power station (completed in 1970) and an 800MW condenser-type power station (completed in 1974), or a combined capacity of 1100MW. In the absence of the expected large steam consumption at Razdan, it has now been suggested that the excessive heat capacity of the power complex be used in local greenhouse cultivation.22 As in the case of Achinsk. the delay in the alumina project induced the planners to proceed at least with cement production, and a cement plant with a capacity of 1.2 million tonnes was commissioned in late 1970 for the growing Armenian market. 23 But the outlook for the alumina section is dim. As of mid- 1975, 43 million rubles still remained to be invested in the project, but only one-tenth of that amount was being allocated annually. 24 The Razdan project continues to be listed in five-year plans, but early completion seems unlikely unless the rate of construction is greatly accelerated. The problems at Achinsk and Razdan appear to have had an impact on further expansion of the use of Kola nepheline. Under plans announced in the 196Os, the production of nepheline concentrate was to have been expanded in the Kirovsk district in an effort to make use of the waste tailings, and the nepheline was to be transported by cheap water route to cement centres in the Volga valley where the existence of a large market would justify the construction of a large-capacity alumina-cement complex. Two sites were proposed: one at Novoul’yanovsk, a cement town south of Ul’yanovsk; the other at Mikhaylovka, in Volgograd Oblast.25 At Novoul’yanovsk, which already has a limestone-based cement plant producing 2 million tonnes a year (opened in 1961), the start of an alumina plant project was actually announced in the late 196Os, but no further word has been heard. 26 At Mikhaylovka, a small cement plant of 1.1 million tonnes capacity was built in the early 1950s and expanded to 2.7 million tonnes in the 196Os, but the alumina project does not appear to have been implemented.27 Failure to go ahead with an expansion of Kola nepheline useevidently
1976
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Raw material
prciblems
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aluminium
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reflected disenchantment among Soviet aluminium planners with the Achinsk project and, by extension, with the entire nepheline avenue to aluminium production. According to advocates of Kola nepheline, the designers of the Achinsk plant ignored the experience of nephelinebased alumina plants at Volkhov and Pikalevo. But the Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy interpreted the failure at Achinsk in its own fashion. It explained the high cost of Siberian alumina by saying that it is ‘far more difficult to process nepheline than it is to process bauxite.‘2s The director of the apatite mining complex was quoted as having said in early 1976: ‘The Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy, which is the principal consumer of nepheline, uses it in limited amounts and plans no significant increase in nepheline consumption in the 10th five-year plan ( 1976-80)‘.29
Alunite
28 lrvestiya, 29 December 1974. “Sovefskaya Rossiya, 5 January 1976. The controversy remains alive. The Kola apatite industry has announced the start of construction of a new nepheline concentrator, looking to a potential total 1980 output of 10 million tonnes of nepheline concentrate. Pravda, 14 April 1976; Gornyy zhurnal, February 1976, pp. 20-21. But the aluminium industry has not announced any plans for further nepheline-based alumina plants. 3o G.V. Labutin. Alunity, Moscow, Metallurgiya. 1965, p 9. 3’ A.I. Metallurgiya legkikh Belyayev, metallov (Metallurgy of light metals). Moscow, Metallurqizdat, 1962, D 148; A.I. Sushkov. and I.A. Troitskiy, Metallurgiya alyuminiya, Moscow, Metallurqiya, 1965, p 22 1. 32 Bakinikiy Rabochiy, Baku newspaper; 26 November 1965; 3 March 1966: Izvestiya, 5 May 1968. 33 Eakinskiy Rabochiy, 19 December 1969; 7 January 1970. 34 Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 12 August 1975. 35 Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 15 December 1973. The start of operations at the sulphuric acid department is evident from announced production figures for the Azerbaijan republic, where another acid plant, at Sumgait, was already producing about 130 000 tonnes a year. The republic’s output rose from 132 000 tonnes in 1972 to 291 000 in 1973, 337 000 in 1974 and 378 000 in 1975. increment represents mainly The Kirovabad production.
230
Aside from nepheline, the only non-bauxitic material that has found commercial use as an alumina source in the Soviet Union is alunite, a potassium aluminium sulphate, found in substantial reserves in the Zaglik deposit near Kirovabad in the Azerbaijan Republic of Transcaucasia. A Soviet engineer, Georgiy V. Labutin, proposed a process by which it can be decomposed to alumina, potassium sulphate (a fertiliser) and sulphur oxides (used to produce sulphuric acid). He contended that this process would be even more economical than the nepheline-based alumina process because the alunite byproducts (sulphuric acid and potassium sulphate) were of higher value than the cement and soda ash obtained in the nepheline process. 3” In the alunite process, as designed by Labutin, 6.6-6.7 tonnes of alunite ore (containing 50% alunite) yield one tonne of alumina as well as 1.15-l -3 tonnes of sulphuric acid and 0.2-0.235 tonne of potassium sulphate. 31 Construction of the Kirovabad alumina plant, with an ultimate designed capacity of 400 000 tonnes of alumina, began in 1955. Construction was not pursued with much energy until 1958, when the pace accelerated and 1962 was set as the target date for the start of the first of four 100 OOO-tonne sections. However, the first alunite ore, hauled from the nearby Zaglik mine (town of Alunitdag) by an 8km cableway and then by a 36km electric railway, reached the alumina plant only in late 1965, and yielded the first alumina and sulphuric acid early the following year. The potassium sulphate department did not open until 1968.32 The breaking-in process proved to be long and difficult. By the end of 1969. the first section of the plant was said to be operating at only 40% capacity, suggesting an alumina output of 40 000 tonnes, and this was to be doubled in 1970.33 The first sulphuric acid section, with a designed capacity of 125 000 tonnes, was not operating properly and was producing only about 15 000 tonnes of acid, much of it below standard. The potassium sulphate department used what was later described as an outdated technology34 and yielded about 20 000 tonnes in 1970. By 1974, the annual production plan for potassium sulphate was announced as 40 000 tonnes, doubling production of both fertiliser and alumina. The sulphuric acid department, having been reconstructed, finally began full operation in 1973.35 It yielded about 250 000 tonnes of acid in 1975, corresponding to about 200 000 tons of alumina and 40 000 tonnes of potassium sulphate.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976
Rah~~naterialprobier?~s
of rhe Soviet aluminium
industry
After nearly a decade of operation, the Kirovabad alumina plant was described as working normally.36 Nevertheless the Soviet aluminium planners saw their future in bauxite rather than in alunite. It was announced in late 1974 that further expansion of alumina production at Kirovabad would be based on imported bauxite. 37 The tenth five-year plan for Kirovabad describes ‘organisation of the processing of imported bauxite’ as the principal task, and set an alumina goal of 800 000 tonnes for 1980, of which half would be alunite-based and half would use bauxite.j8 A storage facility with a capacity of 2 million tonnes of bauxite was inaugurated in February 1976, and the use of bauxite for making alumina was scheduled to start in early 1977.39
x Bakinskiy
Rabochiy, 30 September 1975. This source states that alumina and sulphate potassium production doubled from 1970 to 1974 while sulphuric acid output rose by a factor of 14. 3’ Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 28 December 1974. ” Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 30 January 1976. The five-year plan calls for a nearly fourfold increase in alumina production by 1980 to 380% of the 1975 level, suggesting a goal of about 800 000 tonnes. But the two byproducts of the alunite process are scheduled only to double in production ~ sulphuric acid to increase by 90% and potassium sulphate by 120%. This suggests a doubling of alunite-based alumina, to the original designed capacity of about 400 000 tonnes, leaving another 400 000 tonnes of alumina to be derived from imported bauxite (representing an annual requirement of about 800 000 tonnes of bauxite by 1980). ” Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 18 February 1976. The new Kirovabad operation, using Guinean bauxite, is apparently designed to supply alumina to the Regar aluminium plant in Central Asia. ‘a Granik, op cil Reference 16, pp 85-86: Tsvetnyye Metal/y, March 1968, pp 4446. 4’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 19 August 1959; Promyshlenno-Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 16 March 1960; lrvestiya 31 December 1960. Q Pravda Vostoka, Tashkent newspaper; 19 March 1960; 24 December 1960; 1 April 1965. 43 Pravda Vostoka, 7 January 1968: 2 December 1969: 20 January 1970. 44 Proizvoditel‘nnyye sily Uzbekistana i perspektivy ikh razvitiya (Productive forces of Uzbekistan and prospects of development), Tashkent, Fan, 1974, pp 185-186. 45 Pravda Vostoka, 14 January 1976. Two sites for such an alumina complex have been Angren itself, or proposed : Akhangaran, a town just north of Almalyk where a cement plant with a capacity of 1.5 million tonnes was inaugurated in 1961.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
Other potential aluminium
sources
Aside from the commercial use of bauxite, nepheline and alunite, the Soviet Union has at various times raised the prospects of employing other aluminium-bearing materials, some of which have been tested and have even reached the pilot-plant stage. However none is now scheduled in published plans for commercial use. Kyanite. This alutiinium silicate is present in large deposits in the Keyv (Keiv) upland of the central Kola Peninsula, far from settlement and transportation. More than 20 deposits have been identified in the area, and the Kola branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR has recommended the use of kyanite concentrate for direct electrothermal reduction to aluminium-silicon alloys. The Shuururta deposit. in the heart of the peninsula, has been recommended as a priority site for dkvelopment.40 Sillimanite. This mineral, of the same type as kyanite, is found in a deposit at Kyakhta in southern Siberia on the Mongolian border, and was envisaged in the late 1950s as a raw material for the Irkutsk aluminium plant at Shelekhov. Sillimanite concentrate was obtained from an experimental concentrator in 1959 for use in an electrothermal department that opened at the Irkutsk aluminium plant in late 1960.” However the use of Kyakhta sillimanite did not appear to go beyond that pilot stage, and the Irkutsk plant, whose first electrolytic potline went on stream in 1962, has been using long-haul alumina from the Urals. Pavlodar or Achinsk. Kaolin clay. This clay is present in the overburden of the lignite strip mine of Angren, east of Tashkent in Central Asia, and a lime-sinter process was proposed in the 1950s to convert the kaolin into alumina, with cement as a byproduct. 42 A pilot plant testing the process began operating in 1968-69 at Almalyk, 30 miles west of Angren.43 The pilot phase was completed in 1972, with what were described as positive results justifying the clay-to-alumina conversion on a commercial basis.4’ Advocates of the process have urged implementation, proposing a complex with a capacity of 1 million tonnes of alumina and 6 million tonnes of cement, 45 but such a project has yet to be approved by the Soviet planning authorities. Angren kaolin was originally envisaged as a potential source of alumina for the Regar aluminium plant, which went on stream in 1975, using alumina presumably from foreign sources.
1976
231
RONImaterial problems of the Soviet aluminium
industry
Raw-material
Soviet Aluminium 46Shabad, The Industry, op tit Reference 1, pp 9-l 0. Soviet Aluminium 41 Shabad, Developments in 1959, op tit Reference 1, pp 6-J. 48 Vneshnyaya Torgovlya, June 1976, p
12. Source: Vneshnyaya torqovlya SSSR (Foreign Trade of the USSR), statistical vearbook. Moscow, 1965-l 976. A portion of the increased imports from Guinea in 1975 was stockpiled pending completion of additional alumina-making capacity at Kirovabad and ultimately at Nikolayev. Table 2. Bauxite
GW?Ca Yugoslavia Turkey Guinea Total
232
imports of the Soviet Union
imports
The Soviet Union began importing Hungarian bauxite in the early postwar years. The ore moved by rail over a distance of nearly 4000km to the Urals alumina plants, reaching a peak of 560 000 tonnes in 1950, or about one-fourth of the Soviet Union’s total bauxite supply. Hungary also provided up to about 40 000 tonnes of alumina for the Ukraine’s Zaporozh’ye aluminium plant, where metal production resumed in 1949, but the alumina section was not rebuilt until 1955.4” Both bauxite and alumina shipments ceased in 1955 as Hungary used increasing amounts of raw materials for a domestic alumina and aluminium industry, supplying most of the surplus to East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where aluminium industries were also developing. Beginning in 1955, Greece replaced Hungary as the Soviet Union’s bauxite producer,47 with average annual shipments of 450 000 tonnes in the 1960s rising to an average of 550 000 tonnes in the 1970s. Most of the Greek bauxite was converted into alumina at Zaporozh’ye for use in the local reduction plant and in the Transcaucasian aluminium plants at Sumgait and Yerevan. As the expanding aluminium industry made increasing demands on the Soviet raw-material base, the import programme was significantly expanded in the 1960s. In addition to Greek bauxite, ore-shipments began arriving in 1965 from Yugoslavia, which soon surpassed Greece as the principal supplier; in 1968 from Guinea, and in 1971 from Turkey. By the early 1970s the Soviet Union was importing an annual average of l-6 million tonnes of bauxite, or the equivalent of about 400 000 tonnes of aluminium (see Table 2). In the meantime the Soviet Union had assisted Guinea with the development of a 2.5 million tonne bauxite mining operation at Debele (near Kindia), with Soviet credits to be repaid in bauxite. Operation of the mine began in June 1974, and by the beginning of 1976 it had shipped over 2 million tonnes of bauxite to the USSR, including l-2 million tonnes in repayments of credits. 48 As a result of this massive flow of Guinean bauxite to Soviet Black Sea ports, total bauxite imports jumped dramatically from 1.6 million tonnes in 1974 to nearly 3.5 million tonnes in 1975 (Table 2). Beginning in 1967. as alumina capacity did not keep pace with aluminium capacity increases in Siberia, the Soviet Union also turned increasingly to alumina imports. Under an agreement with Hungary, the Hungarians began in 1967 to ship alumina to the Volgograd aluminium plant (which had first used Urals alumina after its completion in 1959) and took aluminium metal in return under a barter arrangement. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union was receiving an average of 350 000 tonnes of Hungarian alumina, and exporting over IO0 000 tonnes of aluminium metal to Hungary. Other long-term sources of alumina for the Soviet Union have been the
(thousand
tonnes)
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
449
481 124
427 360
430 647
457 721
529 827
615 814
605
787
1077
55 1233
44 1400
119 1548
441 794 152 328 1714
635 690 148
449
526 600 76 211 1413
503 664 203 253 1623
611 947 75 1844 3477
RESOURCES
1473
POLICY
December
1976
Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry Table 3. Alumina
imports of the Soviet union
1967
Source: (Foreign
Vneshnyaya Trade of the
torgovlya SSSR USSR), statistical
yearbook. Moscow, 1965-l columns do not add up rounding.)
976. Some because of
Hungary Greece United States Jamaica Trinidad France Guinea Yugoslavia Guvana T&key Italy India
(thousand
tonnes)
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
148 28 194
169 38 354
202
161
244
345
323
405
291
447 20
243
206 79
85 143
114 169
134 62 26
82 127 51
121 38 76 47
51 903
75 886
59 1029
89 22 53
160 18
29 5
3
Others Total
168
388
596
25 518
127 755
51 698
United States (beginning in 1967), and shipments from Jamaica, Guyana, Turkey and Italy started in 1973. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union was importing as much as one million tonnes of alumina. the equivalent of 500 000 tonnes of aluminium metal (Table 3). Combined raw material imports thus represented about 950 000 tonnes of aluminium production, or 40% of Soviet output. This represented a significant increase in the role of imports over the last decade. In 1965 the Soviet Union derived about 150 000 tonnes of aluminium from imported materials, 15% of total production. Table 4, which reconstructs the raw-material balance of the Soviet aluminium industry, shows that the contribution of the domestic bauxite-mining industry - essentially the Urals and the Arkalyk area of northwest Kazakhstan - has been steadily declining, from 70% in 1965 to about 50% in 1970 and 37% in 1975. In the five-year period from 1965 to 1970, the principal increment was provided by a steep surge in imports, which rose from 15% of the total raw-material supply to 38%. During the five-year period from 1970 to 1975, as the new nepheline-based alumina plant at Achinsk came on stream, nonbauxitic materials provided the principal increment, rising from 12% of the total raw-material supply in 1970 to 23% in 1975.
Outlook for the future Recent
statements
Table 4. Raw material 1 O6 tonnes)
Source: Author’s calculations. Actual bauxite imports in 1975 were 1 ,7 x lo6 tonnes in alumina equivalent, of which about one-half is believed to have been stockpiled.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
in
the
Soviet
press
balance of the Soviet aluminium
industry
suggest
a
(in alumina
general
equivalent
of
1965
%
1970
%
1975
%
Domestic materials Bauxite Nepheline Alunite
1.7 1.4 0.3 -
85 70 15 _
2.1 1.7 0.3 0.1
62 50 9 3
2-9 1.8 0.9 0.2
60 37 19 4
Imported materials Bauxite Alumina
0.3 0.3 -
15 16 _
1.3 0.8 0.5
38 23 15
1.9 0.9 I.0
40 19 21
Total alumina
2.0
100
3.4
100
4.8
100
equivalent
Total aluminium
1976
1 ,o
1.7
2.4
233
Raw material problems of the Soviet alutninium industry
@Pravda Ukrainy, 28 December 1973; Pravda, 29 September 1975. 5oSovetskaya Rossiya, .I 8 August 1975; 3 February 1976. 5’ Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, No 5, 1975, p 13. See also Paul Dibb. Siberia and the Pacihc. New York, Praeger. 1972, p 264.
234
disenchantment with non-bauxitic domestic raw materials, both on technological and economic grounds. Having completed the two principal non-bauxitic projects - Achinsk nepheline and Kirovabad alunite ~ that had been designed in the late 19SOs, the Soviet aluminium planners now appear to be turning increasingly to imported raw materials as a source for future expansion of the industry. In addition to the planned bauxite-based expansion of the Kirovabad alumina plant, a new alumina plant is under construction on the Black Sea coast of the Ukraine. This plant, with an estimated capacity ‘of 1 million tonnes, is situated at Zhovtnevoye, a southern suburb of Nikolayev. 4y It will process Guinean bauxite. Nikolayev alumina is to be hauled by railway over a distance of nearly 4800km to the Sayanogorsk aluminium plant, with an estimated capacity of 500 000 tonnes. The Sayanogorsk plant is scheduled to go into operation in conjunction with the adjacent Sayan hydro-electric station, now scheduled for first power production in 1978.50 Soviet planners have also recommended the construction of a second seaboard alumina plant on the Pacific coast. This plant, which would be built in the 1980s would have a capacity of 1.1 million tonnes of alumina and would be located at a site yet to be determined in the Maritime Territory of the Soviet Far East. It would process imported bauxite. possibly from Australia, and ship its alumina to the aluminium plants of southern Siberia. The long-term Soviet intention is to re-export aluminium metal to countries in the Pacific basin.51 Such an operation would be greatly facilitated by the construction of the 3200km Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway, to be completed in the early 1980s. This new railway, running parallel to, and north of, the present Trans.Siberian Railway, is designed mainly to open up new Siberian resource sites for export through Pacific ports. Much of the traffic on the BAM railway would thus be eastbound, making it particularly suitable for hauling large volumes of alumina from the coast westward to the Siberian reduction plants. Over the long run, the growing hydra-electric complex of southern Siberia may well hecomc one of the world’s leading aluminium reduction centres, importing raw material and re-exporting metal.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976
Theodore Shabad
The Soviet
Union
hydro-electric
possesses
power sites
attractive reduction
for
capacity,
supplied
with
bauxite
but
for
the
notably
nepheline in recent
and
alunite,
years,
and
aluminium
planners
increasing
preference
bauxite
and
much
as 40%
an unusual
sources Future
are demonstrated
by the
expansion
of earlier of
production, Sea
coast
based
construction plant
and
of
on the
proposals
seaboard coast,
plans for an
non-bauxite
the
alumina
Pacific
to become
metal.
abandonment
second
from
indicating ore
strategic
intentions
as
aluminium
materials,
on foreign
this
of
1975
derived
willingness
dependent
large
By
of Soviet
raw
an
for imports
was
imported
has
Soviet
have shown
alumina.
production
poorly
use of nonmaterials,
domestic
waned
is
domestic An early
resources.
bauxitic
for
aluminium
high-grade
enthusiasm
in
providing
Siberia,
southern
a huge
potential
for
plant
both
using
a
Black
on
a the
imported
bauxite. The
author
editor
is
Geography:
Review
a
translation
monthly
author of
the
of
Soviet
Translation, journal,
and
of Basic
Industrial
Resources
USSR
(Columbia
University
Press, 1969).
222
and
The Soviet Union, generally presumed to be one of the major potential purveyors of mineral raw materials to the world economy, is poorly endowed with resources for one of its rapidly growing industries - aluminium. Despite an intensive geological prospecting effort over the years, identified exploitable reserves of high-grade bauxite remain limited. The nation’s economic planners have sought to overcome the domestic bauxite shortage in two ways: first by pioneering the use of non-bauxite raw materials, such as nepheline and alunite, which are not used elsewhere in the commercial production of alumina, the intermediate product of aluminium processing; secondly by steadily increasing imports of both bauxite and alumina from a wide range of foreign suppliers. In 1975, out of a national aluminium metal output estimated at 2.4 x lo6 tonnes, only 37% was derived from domestic bauxite resources, with 23% coming from non-bauxitic materials and 40% from imported raw materials. There has been growing evidence in the Soviet press and technical literature that Moscow planners have become disenchanted with the technical problems and the economics of using the non-bauxitic materials, once widely publicised as the potential solution to the Soviet Union’s raw material problems in the aluminium industry. No expansion of non-bauxitic projects appears to be planned and, in fact, an alunite-based alumina plant is being expanded partly for the use of imported bauxite. The outlook is therefore for growing reliance on imported raw materials for an expanding aluminium industry as the vast hydro-electric potential of south-central Siberia is being realised.
Historical development From the time its aluminium industry began in 1933, the Soviet Union has become the world’s second largest producer of aluminium metal, with an annual output of 2.4 x lo6 tonnes. This is about half of normal United States output and twice the level of the world’s third producing nation, Japan (see Table 1). The Soviet industry had its beginnings in northwest European Russia, where a small aluminium plant, with a designed capacity of
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976
Raw materialproblems of the Soviet aluminium industry Table 1. Principal aluminium
Source:
Central
Handbook Publication 1976,
Intelligence
Agency,
of Economic Statistics 1976, ER 76-10481, September
p 99.
United States Soviet Union Japan Canada West Germany Norway France China United Kingdom Australia Spain Rumania *I974
’ For a detailed account of the Soviet aluminium industry up to the late 1950s. see T. Shabad. The Soviet Aluminium industry, American Metal Market, New York, 1958, 25 pp, and a supplement Soviet Aluminium Development in 1959, American Metal Market, New York, 1960. 22 pp. For developments during the 1960s. see T. Shabad, Basic industrial Resources of the USSR, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, pp. 58-63 and elsewhere under individual projects.
RESQURCES
POLICY
December
producing
countries
(thousand
tonnes)
1965
1970
1975
2499 1000 294 753 234 276 340 115 36 88 52 -
3607 1700 733 962 309 522 381 220 40 168 120 107
3519 2450 1016 878 678 590 383 320’ 308 223 210 204
estimate
1 I 000 tonnes went on stream in 1932 at Volkhov near Leningrad, using low-grade bauxite from a nearby deposit at Boksitogorsk and power from a small local hydro-electric station. The Volkhov plant was followed in 1933 by the opening of a 36 OOO-tonne reduction plant a Zaporozh’ye at a new Dnieper River hydro-electric station in the Ukraine. Alumina was at first derived from bauxite at the two reduction plants and, as requirements expanded, from an additional alumina plant opened in 1938 at the Boksitogorsk mine itself.’ The discovery of bauxite resources in the Urals, of higher grade than the Boksitogorsk deposit, led to the growth of the aluminium industry in the Urals, starting in the mid-1930s. This eastward trend was accelerated during World War II by the loss of the aluminium capacity in the European part of the country under German occupation. The first combined alumina and aluminium plant in the Urals opened in 1939 at Kamensk. During the war, some equipment could be evacuated from the threatened plants at Zaporozh’ye and Volkhov and was installed in a new aluminium plant built at Stalinsk (now Novokuznetsk), put in operation in 1943 in Siberia’s Kuznetsk Basin, and in a second combined alumina (1943) and aluminium plant (1945) in the Urals, at Krasnoturinsk, not far from the North Urals bauxite centre of Severoural’sk. As a result of these projects, Soviet aluminium production rose during World War II from 60 000 tonnes in 1940 to about 85 000 tonnes in 1945, despite the loss of the plants in the European part of the USSR. After the war, expansion of aluminium capacity resumed at first in the European part of the country, based both on domestic bauxite and on some bauxite imports that came initially from Hungary and later from Greece. Aside from the reconstruction of the two prewar plants, at Volkhov and Zaporozh’ye, five new aluminium reduction plants were put into operation during the 1950s. Two became part of the northwest cluster of the industry, with the Kandalaksha plant on the Kola Peninsula opened in 1951 and the Nadvoitsy plant in Karelia put in operation in 1954. Two others became part of a southwest cluster in Transcaucasia, with the Yerevan plant in Armenia starting in 1950 and the Sumgait plant near Baku in Azerbaijan in 1955. The fifth and then largest reduction plant (with a capacity of about 200 000 tonnes of metal) went on stream in 1959 at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), on the site of a new Volga River hydro-electric station. This expansion programme, still based largely on domestic bauxite
1976
223
Raw malerialproblems @he Soviet aluminium industry
224
RESOURCES POLICY December1976
Rawmaterialproblems
oj’the Soviet aluminium industry
resources, raised primary aluminium production from about 155 000 tonnes in 1950 to 430 000 in 1955 and about 550 000 tonnes in 1960. In the 1960s a new phase in the Soviet aluminium industry began as the development of the huge hydro-electric potential on the Angara and Yenisey rivers in south-central Siberia attracted large new aluminium reduction capacity. The rapid expansion of the industry generated raw-material demands that could no longer be met from traditional bauxite sources, and stimulated a search for additional domestic bauxite, even if of low grade; the expansion also led to the use of non-bauxitic materials and, beginning in the mid-1960s, a greatly expanded raw-material import programme. Three new plants opened production in Siberia during the 196Os, each associated with a major hydroelectric station. They were opened at Shelekhov (near Irkutsk) in 1962, at Krasnoyarsk in 1964, and at Bratsk in 1966. A fourth, associated with the Sayan hydro-electric station under construction on the Yenisey at Sayanogorsk is to go on stream in 1978. The only new plant outside Siberia is the Regar plant, which went into operation in April 1975 in the Tadzhik Republic of Central Asia, using power from the Nurek hydro-electric station.* This pronounced eastward shift of aluminium capacity raised Soviet production to about 1 million tonnes in 1965, with 35% coming from Siberia; 1.7 million in 1970, with about 50% from Siberia: and 2.4 million in 1975, with about 65% from Siberia. The new five-year plan (1976-80) has set an increase of 20-30% in aluminium production, or at least 2.9 million tonnes by 1980. This increase will come from the installation of the final production units at Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk, additional units at Regar and the first units at the new Sayanogorsk plant.3 2 Pravda, 27 April 1975. The first stage, with four potlines. may have produced about 50 000 tonnes of aluminium in 1975. The five-year plan 1976-80 calls for a production growth of 560%. Pravda, 6 January 1976, with the addition of one potline planned for 1977, three for 1978 and three more for the 1979-80 period, Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, No 4 1976. 3 The Soviet Union does not publish official production statistics for the aluminium industry. Western estimates vary widely, with a series published by the US Bureau of Mines for primary metal output running at about 70% of the production level of a series published by the Central Intelligence Agency. The Bureau of Mines fiaure for 1970 was 1’ 1 million tonnes, M&era/ Yearbook 1972, Vol III: Area reports: International, Washington, 1974, p 817. The CIA figure for 1970 was 1.7 million tonnes, Handbook of Economic Statistics 1975, op cit. The present author has found the CIA figures to conform more closely to the scattered indications found in the Soviet technical literature and the Soviet press. The last unit at Bratsk went on stream in July 1976, completing a capacity of 500 000 tonnes. Sovetskaya Rossiya. 17 July 1976. ’ Severo-Zapadnyy ekonomicheskiy rayon (The Northwest Economic Region) Nauka, Moscow, 1967, p 83; A.V. Darinskiy, Leningradskaya Oblast’, Leningrad, Lenizdat, 1975, p 346.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
Domestic bauxite resources The Soviet Union now mines bauxite in three areas: Boksitogorsk near Tikhvin, in the Leningrad area, Severoural’sk in the northern Urals, and Arkalyk in the Turgay area of northwest Kazakhstan. The Boksitogorsk deposit, discovered in 19 16, contained relatively small reserves of low-grade bauxite (41-48% alumina) with a high silica content (lo-20%), but it became the first Soviet source of bauxite, with modern mining operations getting under way in the early 1930s. The bauxite was converted into alumina at the Volkhov alumina-aluminium plant (commissioned in 1932) and at a local alumina plant (opened in 1938). Boksitogorsk-based alumina was the principal raw material for the northwest cluster of the Soviet aluminium industry until the early 196Os, when nepheline (a byproduct of the Kola apatite operation) became the principal resource base for the northwestern plants. By that time, the most accessible and highest grade bauxite had been depleted at Boksitogorsk and the local alumina plant was converted in 1960-65 to the production of abrasive-grade a!umina for grinding and polishing materials.4 Since that time, the Boksitogorsk bauxite mine has in effect ceased to be a significant element in the Soviet aluminium industry. The northern Urals bauxite mines at Severoural’sk, known as the Krasnaya Shapochka (Red Ridinghood) deposit, yield a high-grade ore of 53% alumina and about 4% silica that represents the Soviet Union’s principal source of domestic bauxite. The deposit was
1976
225
Raw materialproblems of the Soviet aluminium industry
5 Gornyy
zhumal, October 1974. In 1976 a shaft mine was being driven to a depth of 1250 metres at the rate of 35 to 40 metres a month. Stroitel’naya Gareta, 9 June 1976. ’ Izvestiya, 14 January 1972. ’ Severoural’sk output was close to 500 000 tonnes in 1945, (Shabad, Soviet Aluminum Developments in 1959, op tit Reference 1, p 2). Subsequent increases were reported by Soviet sources as follows: 170% in 1945-55 and 50% in 1955-65. Gornyy zhurnal, December 1967: 22% in 1965-70 and about 25% in 1970-75, Gornyy zhurnal, October 1974, yielding about 3 million tonnes in 1975. ‘The start of operations in the Ayat deposit was announced in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 5 October 1971: Lower Ashut in Sovetskaya Latviya, 6 January 1974 and Upper Ashut in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 16 August 1975. The need for a mix of ores is discussed in Narodnoye Khozyaystvo Kazakhstana, November 1970. pp 51-54. 9 Tsvetnyye Metally, August 1975; Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 23 November 1974. lo Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 2 1 November 1975, gives a bauxite increase of 50%. and the same publication, on 5 September 1976, gives 36%. The Pavlodar alumina growth (23%) is from Narodnoye Khoryaystvo Kazakhstana, June 1976.
226
discovered in 193 1, and mining operations began in 1934, when Urals bauxite began to move to the Zaporozh’ye alumina-aluminium plant, replacing the lower-grade Boksitogorsk ore at that Ukrainian plant. During World War II the Severoural’sk mining district became the Soviet Union’s main bauxite producer, forming the basis of two Urals alumina-aluminium plants, one at nearby Krasnoturinsk (alumina commissioned in 1943 and aluminium in 1945), the other at Kamensk, in the middle Urals, where a combined alumina-aluminium plant open in 1939. In the postwar period, the Urals supplied alumina to the expanding aluminium industry in the European part of the USSR and. after 1960, increasingly to the new large metal-reduction plants in Siberia. Development of the Urals reserves has been hampered by an Unlike the surface deposits of unfavourable mining geology. Boksitogorsk, most of the Urals reserves lie underground in karst limestone and have been plagued by severe flooding problems. Early mining operations were in small open pits and sloping shafts. As mining proceeded in the 1950s to greater depths below the watertable, the flooding problem became so severe that surface streams had to be diverted or their channels had to be lined with impervious materials. This river-control programme made it possible to tap deeper horizons and to start some large open pits in areas previously subject to flooding. Beginning in the 1960s several vertical shaft mines were driven to depths of 500 metres or more, and there are plans to penetrate to 1600 metres.5 The first large open-pit mine began operations in late 197 1.6 Bauxite production in the Severoural’sk district increased from close to 500 000 tonnes in 1945 to 2 million tonnes in 1965 and 3 million tonnes in 1975, accounting for about three-fourths of Soviet domestic bauxite in alumina equivalent.’ The Arkalyk bauxite deposit in northeast Kazakhstan, containing a high-silica bauxite (45-46% alumina, 12% silica), was discovered in 1946, and an open-pit operation began production in 1964, designed for an ultimate capacity of 3 million tonnes. The bauxite from Arkalyk is hauled 1120km by rail to an alumina plant with a designed capacity of 500 000 tonnes that was also put on stream in 1964. Pavlodar alumina is shipped to Siberian aluminium plants. It has become apparent in recent years that the reserves of the best bauxite in the Arkalyk area are limited (about 20 years if used at full capacity) and this has required the exploitation of inferior bauxite deposits nearby for a mix with the higher Arkalyk grades-the Lower Ashut deposit, with poorer ore, opened in 1974, and the Upper Ashut deposit in 1975. The Ayat deposit, about 400km miles northwest of Arkalyk, has been producing such inferior bauxite since 197 1.’ As a result of the deterioration of the raw-material base, the Pavlodar alumina plant has experienced operational difficulties. Because of the high-silica content of the bauxite, the plant had been designed for the combination process in which the standard Bayer process yields a red mud from which additional alumina is then extracted by the lime-soda sinter process. The inferior bauxite yielded more red mud than originally designed, upsetting the capacity ratio of the Bayer and sinter sections.9 The deterioration of the raw-material input was evident from the fact that bauxite mining in the Arkalyk district increased between 36 and 50% from 1970 to 1975 while alumina output at Pavlodar rose by only 23%.‘O Soviet authors have noted that the Pavlodar alumina plant is the only installation in the
RESOURCES
POLICY December
1976
Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry
world that is processing such low-grade aluminous raw material in large volumes, pointing out that the material would be regarded abroad as lateritic clay rather than bauxite. This author estimates that by 1975 the Pavlodar alumina plant produced about 500 000 tonnes a year. using about 2 million tonnes of the low-grade Kazakhstan bauxite, an unusually high bauxite-alumina ratio of 4: 1. Outside of the two major bauxite mining districts - the northern Urals and northwest Kazakhstan - development of the North Onega deposit (on the Onega River near Plesetsk in northern European Russia) has begun. The deposit, low-grade bauxite containing 53% Al, 0, and as much as 18.5% SiOz , was discovered in 1949, and development of a surface mine began in 1967. The bauxite lies under a water-saturated overburden, and the area of the prospective pit had to be drained before excavation could begin. After seven years of work, a 00 metre deep pit was completed and the first bauxite was extracted in 1974.” However there has been no further word about the development of the mine, and it has not been included in the published outline of the new five-year plan 1976-80. More significantly. perhaps, the Soviet Union has not announced the formal creation of an urban centre on the site of the mine. Design calculations in the 1960s concluded that North Onega bauxite would be mined more cheaply than the Arkalyk bauxite of Kazakhstan. North Onega bauxite was envisaged as a raw material source for the Boksitogorsk alumina plant (replacing the depleted local deposit) and for the Zaporozh’ye alumina-aluminium plant in the Ukraine. Ultimately a local alumina plant near the North Onega deposit had been projected. I2 However there has been no recent report on progress, and the outlook for the mining project remains in doubt. Future commercial bauxite prospects are focused on the Timan district in the Komi Autonomous Republic of northern European Russia and on the Belgorod district of central European Russia. Geological exploration in the Timan district has focused in recent years on the VezhayuVorykva deposit, 200km northwest of the town of Ukhta, where the bauxite, accessible by surface mining, contains 45-48% alumina and about 10% silica. So far identified reserves have not been adequate for commercial development.13
Nepheline
” lzvestiya. 30 June 1974; Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya, 9 July 1974. Urban planners have also designed a future city for the mining site, to be .called Severorossiysk, with an ultimate population of 100000. lzvestiya. 6 July 1976. l2 Severe-Zapadnyy ekonomicheskiy rayon, op tit Reference 4, p 80-81. l3 Sovetskava Geologiya. December 1975, pp 114-l 15 l4 I.N. Kitler and Yu. A. Layner, Nefeliny ~ kompleksnoye syr’ye alyuminiyevo y promyshlennosti (Nephelines a multicomponent raw material for the aluminium industry), Moscow, Metallurgizdat. 1962, p 3 1
RESOURCES
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December
The first non-bauxitic source of alumina in the Soviet Union was the nepheline, a complex silicate of sodium, potassium and aluminium, that occurs with apatite, a calcium phosphate, in the Kirovsk district of the Kola Peninsula of northern European Russia. The mining of apatite. the principal Soviet source of phosphatic fertiliser, began in I93 1, with the nepheline component discarded as tailings in the process of apatite concentration. The possibility of using nepheline concentrate (29’?0 Al, 0,) from the tailings for the production of alumina was demonstrated experimentally in 1932, and a nepheline concentrator was built at Kirovsk in 1939.14 However, World War II intervened, and it was only after the war that the nepheline-to-alumina process was introduced commercially, first at the Volkhov aluminaaluminium plant near Leningrad, and then at a larger, new alumina plant at Pikalevo. near the old bauxite centre of Boksitogorsk. The alumina plant at Volkhov, originally based on the use of Boksitogorsk bauxite, was converted to the nepheline process in the
1976
227
Raw
material problems ofthe Soviet aluminous
15The alumina output in the northwest can be estimated both from published soda-ash production (about 260 000 tonnes in 1970) on the basis of 0.75 tonne of soda ash for every tonne of alumina nepheline-based and from published data on cement production from nepheline-based alumina plants (about 2.5 million tonnes) on the basis of 7 tonnes of cement for every tonne of alumina. 16The 1975 apatite output was given in Pravda. 20 February 1976. For the apatite-nepheline ratio see G.I. Granik, Ekonomicheskiye problemy razvitiya i proizvoditel’nykh Sil razmeshcheniya Yevropeyskogo Severa SSSR (Economic problems in the development and location of productive forces in the European North of the USSR), Moscow, Nauka. 1971, p 1 18. For the actual use of concentrate, nepheline see Ekonornicheskaya Gazeta, No 7. 1974. and Izvestiya, 29 December 1974. ‘I Stroitel’naya Gazeta, 14 May 1965: 12 April 1970: 1 January 1972.
228
industry
late 1940s and the first shipment of nepheline concentrate from Kirovsk was received in 1949. It took five years for the new technology to be mastered, and it was not completely operational until 1954. The process was judged so successful at the time that it was introduced at the new Pikalevo alumina plant, commissioned in 1959. Despite the low alumina content in nepheline (29%, compared with about 50% in high-grade bauxite), the nepheline process was judged to be economical because it yields both cement and alkalis (soda ash and potash) as byproducts. The sintering of 4-4.5 tonnes of nepheline concentrate with about twice as much limestone yields one tonne of alumina, one tonne of alkalis and about 7 tonnes of cement. The large limestone requirements and the large potential cement yield made the nepheline-limestone sinter process particularly economical in areas with large limestone resources and a nearby market for the vast cement output. The nepheline-based alumina capacity in the northwest region of the European USSR is limited to about 350 000 tonnes (about 50 000 tonnes at Volkhov and about 300 000 tonnes at Pikalevo).15 The processing capacity has limited the use of nepheline concentrate to I a5 million tonnes a year, which represents only about one-sixth of the nepheline potential of the tailings left by the apatite industry. If fully used, the mining operation in the Kola Peninsula would yield one tonne of nepheline concentrate for every 1.5 tonnes of apatite concentrate: in 1975, 15 million tonnes of apatite concentrate were produced at Kirovsk, equivalent to a potential nepheline output of 10 million tonnes.r6 The apparent cost-effectiveness of the nepheline process in the northwest, which resulted in part from the fact that the nepheline was a byproduct of a major apatite mining industry, stimulated the use of nepheline as an aluminous raw material elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Development began in the middle 1950s on two sites that appeared the most suitable: the Achinsk district of southern Siberia, which was to be the first of a series of large nepheline-based alumina plants supplying the expanding aluminium industry of Siberia, and the Razdan district of Armenia, which was to become a nepheline-based alumina source for the Transcaucasian cluster of the aluminium industry. The Achinsk project was originally designed to use nepheline from a nepheline-syenite deposit at Goryachegorsk, 150km southwest of Achinsk, and a railway to the site was completed in 1959. However, the discovery of a higher-grade deposit on the Kiya-Shaltyr River at Belogorsk, 56km farther to the southwest, disrupted the original plans. It required new engineering designs adapted to the new ore, the building of a new access railway, and the start of construction at the Belogorsk site from scratch. The shift in raw-material base delayed completion of the Achinsk plant. As a makeshift operation, the cement section of the project went on stream in 1965 on the basis of a local limestone deposit, with a capacity of 2 million tonnes of cement. Alumina production did not begin until April 1970, with the tenth and final rotary calcination kiln installed in late 197 1.” It soon became evident that the Achinsk alumina plant, with a designed capacity of 800 000 tonnes, was not working efficiently or economically. A report in the Soviet Government newspaper /zvesti_~~~in 1974 called the project a failure, saying that after 15
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976
Raw
I8 lzvestiya, 29 December 1974. I9 Tsvetnyye Metally, January 1975: June 1975: August 1975. *O The 1975 estimate for Achinsk alumina is further supported by the output announcement in Stroitel’naya Gazeta, 8 February 1976, that alumina production is scheduled to rise by 43% in the new five-year plan 1976-80, presumably to reach the designed capacity of 800 000 tonnes. *’ Kommunist, Yerevan newspaper: 28 December 1963: 13 July 1966: 22 June 1969; 16 March 1971; 3 August 1975. ” Kommunist, 7 January 1970: 3 August 1974: 4 January 1976. 23 Kommunist, 5 November 1970. 24 Kommunist, 3 August 1975. 25/zvestiya, 4 April 1967; Granik op tit Reference 16. p 120. ” Tsvetnyye Metally. June 1967; November 1969; Sovetskaya Rossiya, 2 1 March 1970. 27 Tsvetnyye Metally. June 1967: November 1969; Problemy razvitiya i razmeshcheniya proizvoditel’nykh sil Povolzh’ya (Problems of development and location of productive forces in the Volga region). Moscow, Mysl’, 1973, p 156.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
material
problems
of
the Soviet aluminium industry
years of construction the plant, ‘did not justify the hopes that had been placed in the use of nepheline in Siberia, and the output, once advertised as the cheapest alumina in the USSR, in fact turned out very expensive.‘i8 According to other Soviet accounts, only 53.5% of the plant’s capacity was being used in 1973 and the plant was expected to work profitably only in the fourth quarter of 1975. One reason for the uneconomical operation, aside from any technological problems, was the limitation of the cement market in southern Siberia. Since it was not economical to haul cement over long distances, only about one-half of the byproduct calcium silicate (the so-called belite slurry) was being used for byproduct cement at Achinsk.” By 1975, judging from a soda-ash yield of about 400 000 tonnes, the Achinsk plant was producing about 550 000 tonnes of alumina, or about twothirds of designed capacity.” The Armenia nepheline project was designed in 1958; construction began in 1960, and it is still incomplete.21 The use of the ore, from the Tezhsar nepheline-syenite deposit near Razdan, had been described by the Armenian designers as yielding not only byproduct cement, but also a wide range of chemicals (sodium and calcium metasilicates, potash, amorphous silica) enhancing the cost-effectiveness of the nepheline-alumina operation. In anticipation of the new industry, Razdan was selected as the site for Armenia’s largest power generating complex. It consists of a 300MW heat and power station (completed in 1970) and an 800MW condenser-type power station (completed in 1974), or a combined capacity of 1100MW. In the absence of the expected large steam consumption at Razdan, it has now been suggested that the excessive heat capacity of the power complex be used in local greenhouse cultivation.22 As in the case of Achinsk. the delay in the alumina project induced the planners to proceed at least with cement production, and a cement plant with a capacity of 1.2 million tonnes was commissioned in late 1970 for the growing Armenian market. 23 But the outlook for the alumina section is dim. As of mid- 1975, 43 million rubles still remained to be invested in the project, but only one-tenth of that amount was being allocated annually. 24 The Razdan project continues to be listed in five-year plans, but early completion seems unlikely unless the rate of construction is greatly accelerated. The problems at Achinsk and Razdan appear to have had an impact on further expansion of the use of Kola nepheline. Under plans announced in the 196Os, the production of nepheline concentrate was to have been expanded in the Kirovsk district in an effort to make use of the waste tailings, and the nepheline was to be transported by cheap water route to cement centres in the Volga valley where the existence of a large market would justify the construction of a large-capacity alumina-cement complex. Two sites were proposed: one at Novoul’yanovsk, a cement town south of Ul’yanovsk; the other at Mikhaylovka, in Volgograd Oblast.25 At Novoul’yanovsk, which already has a limestone-based cement plant producing 2 million tonnes a year (opened in 1961), the start of an alumina plant project was actually announced in the late 196Os, but no further word has been heard. 26 At Mikhaylovka, a small cement plant of 1.1 million tonnes capacity was built in the early 1950s and expanded to 2.7 million tonnes in the 196Os, but the alumina project does not appear to have been implemented.27 Failure to go ahead with an expansion of Kola nepheline useevidently
1976
229
Raw material
prciblems
ofthe
Soviet
aluminium
industry
reflected disenchantment among Soviet aluminium planners with the Achinsk project and, by extension, with the entire nepheline avenue to aluminium production. According to advocates of Kola nepheline, the designers of the Achinsk plant ignored the experience of nephelinebased alumina plants at Volkhov and Pikalevo. But the Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy interpreted the failure at Achinsk in its own fashion. It explained the high cost of Siberian alumina by saying that it is ‘far more difficult to process nepheline than it is to process bauxite.‘2s The director of the apatite mining complex was quoted as having said in early 1976: ‘The Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy, which is the principal consumer of nepheline, uses it in limited amounts and plans no significant increase in nepheline consumption in the 10th five-year plan ( 1976-80)‘.29
Alunite
28 lrvestiya, 29 December 1974. “Sovefskaya Rossiya, 5 January 1976. The controversy remains alive. The Kola apatite industry has announced the start of construction of a new nepheline concentrator, looking to a potential total 1980 output of 10 million tonnes of nepheline concentrate. Pravda, 14 April 1976; Gornyy zhurnal, February 1976, pp. 20-21. But the aluminium industry has not announced any plans for further nepheline-based alumina plants. 3o G.V. Labutin. Alunity, Moscow, Metallurgiya. 1965, p 9. 3’ A.I. Metallurgiya legkikh Belyayev, metallov (Metallurgy of light metals). Moscow, Metallurqizdat, 1962, D 148; A.I. Sushkov. and I.A. Troitskiy, Metallurgiya alyuminiya, Moscow, Metallurqiya, 1965, p 22 1. 32 Bakinikiy Rabochiy, Baku newspaper; 26 November 1965; 3 March 1966: Izvestiya, 5 May 1968. 33 Eakinskiy Rabochiy, 19 December 1969; 7 January 1970. 34 Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 12 August 1975. 35 Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 15 December 1973. The start of operations at the sulphuric acid department is evident from announced production figures for the Azerbaijan republic, where another acid plant, at Sumgait, was already producing about 130 000 tonnes a year. The republic’s output rose from 132 000 tonnes in 1972 to 291 000 in 1973, 337 000 in 1974 and 378 000 in 1975. increment represents mainly The Kirovabad production.
230
Aside from nepheline, the only non-bauxitic material that has found commercial use as an alumina source in the Soviet Union is alunite, a potassium aluminium sulphate, found in substantial reserves in the Zaglik deposit near Kirovabad in the Azerbaijan Republic of Transcaucasia. A Soviet engineer, Georgiy V. Labutin, proposed a process by which it can be decomposed to alumina, potassium sulphate (a fertiliser) and sulphur oxides (used to produce sulphuric acid). He contended that this process would be even more economical than the nepheline-based alumina process because the alunite byproducts (sulphuric acid and potassium sulphate) were of higher value than the cement and soda ash obtained in the nepheline process. 3” In the alunite process, as designed by Labutin, 6.6-6.7 tonnes of alunite ore (containing 50% alunite) yield one tonne of alumina as well as 1.15-l -3 tonnes of sulphuric acid and 0.2-0.235 tonne of potassium sulphate. 31 Construction of the Kirovabad alumina plant, with an ultimate designed capacity of 400 000 tonnes of alumina, began in 1955. Construction was not pursued with much energy until 1958, when the pace accelerated and 1962 was set as the target date for the start of the first of four 100 OOO-tonne sections. However, the first alunite ore, hauled from the nearby Zaglik mine (town of Alunitdag) by an 8km cableway and then by a 36km electric railway, reached the alumina plant only in late 1965, and yielded the first alumina and sulphuric acid early the following year. The potassium sulphate department did not open until 1968.32 The breaking-in process proved to be long and difficult. By the end of 1969. the first section of the plant was said to be operating at only 40% capacity, suggesting an alumina output of 40 000 tonnes, and this was to be doubled in 1970.33 The first sulphuric acid section, with a designed capacity of 125 000 tonnes, was not operating properly and was producing only about 15 000 tonnes of acid, much of it below standard. The potassium sulphate department used what was later described as an outdated technology34 and yielded about 20 000 tonnes in 1970. By 1974, the annual production plan for potassium sulphate was announced as 40 000 tonnes, doubling production of both fertiliser and alumina. The sulphuric acid department, having been reconstructed, finally began full operation in 1973.35 It yielded about 250 000 tonnes of acid in 1975, corresponding to about 200 000 tons of alumina and 40 000 tonnes of potassium sulphate.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976
Rah~~naterialprobier?~s
of rhe Soviet aluminium
industry
After nearly a decade of operation, the Kirovabad alumina plant was described as working normally.36 Nevertheless the Soviet aluminium planners saw their future in bauxite rather than in alunite. It was announced in late 1974 that further expansion of alumina production at Kirovabad would be based on imported bauxite. 37 The tenth five-year plan for Kirovabad describes ‘organisation of the processing of imported bauxite’ as the principal task, and set an alumina goal of 800 000 tonnes for 1980, of which half would be alunite-based and half would use bauxite.j8 A storage facility with a capacity of 2 million tonnes of bauxite was inaugurated in February 1976, and the use of bauxite for making alumina was scheduled to start in early 1977.39
x Bakinskiy
Rabochiy, 30 September 1975. This source states that alumina and sulphate potassium production doubled from 1970 to 1974 while sulphuric acid output rose by a factor of 14. 3’ Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 28 December 1974. ” Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 30 January 1976. The five-year plan calls for a nearly fourfold increase in alumina production by 1980 to 380% of the 1975 level, suggesting a goal of about 800 000 tonnes. But the two byproducts of the alunite process are scheduled only to double in production ~ sulphuric acid to increase by 90% and potassium sulphate by 120%. This suggests a doubling of alunite-based alumina, to the original designed capacity of about 400 000 tonnes, leaving another 400 000 tonnes of alumina to be derived from imported bauxite (representing an annual requirement of about 800 000 tonnes of bauxite by 1980). ” Bakinskiy Rabochiy, 18 February 1976. The new Kirovabad operation, using Guinean bauxite, is apparently designed to supply alumina to the Regar aluminium plant in Central Asia. ‘a Granik, op cil Reference 16, pp 85-86: Tsvetnyye Metal/y, March 1968, pp 4446. 4’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 19 August 1959; Promyshlenno-Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, 16 March 1960; lrvestiya 31 December 1960. Q Pravda Vostoka, Tashkent newspaper; 19 March 1960; 24 December 1960; 1 April 1965. 43 Pravda Vostoka, 7 January 1968: 2 December 1969: 20 January 1970. 44 Proizvoditel‘nnyye sily Uzbekistana i perspektivy ikh razvitiya (Productive forces of Uzbekistan and prospects of development), Tashkent, Fan, 1974, pp 185-186. 45 Pravda Vostoka, 14 January 1976. Two sites for such an alumina complex have been Angren itself, or proposed : Akhangaran, a town just north of Almalyk where a cement plant with a capacity of 1.5 million tonnes was inaugurated in 1961.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
Other potential aluminium
sources
Aside from the commercial use of bauxite, nepheline and alunite, the Soviet Union has at various times raised the prospects of employing other aluminium-bearing materials, some of which have been tested and have even reached the pilot-plant stage. However none is now scheduled in published plans for commercial use. Kyanite. This alutiinium silicate is present in large deposits in the Keyv (Keiv) upland of the central Kola Peninsula, far from settlement and transportation. More than 20 deposits have been identified in the area, and the Kola branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR has recommended the use of kyanite concentrate for direct electrothermal reduction to aluminium-silicon alloys. The Shuururta deposit. in the heart of the peninsula, has been recommended as a priority site for dkvelopment.40 Sillimanite. This mineral, of the same type as kyanite, is found in a deposit at Kyakhta in southern Siberia on the Mongolian border, and was envisaged in the late 1950s as a raw material for the Irkutsk aluminium plant at Shelekhov. Sillimanite concentrate was obtained from an experimental concentrator in 1959 for use in an electrothermal department that opened at the Irkutsk aluminium plant in late 1960.” However the use of Kyakhta sillimanite did not appear to go beyond that pilot stage, and the Irkutsk plant, whose first electrolytic potline went on stream in 1962, has been using long-haul alumina from the Urals. Pavlodar or Achinsk. Kaolin clay. This clay is present in the overburden of the lignite strip mine of Angren, east of Tashkent in Central Asia, and a lime-sinter process was proposed in the 1950s to convert the kaolin into alumina, with cement as a byproduct. 42 A pilot plant testing the process began operating in 1968-69 at Almalyk, 30 miles west of Angren.43 The pilot phase was completed in 1972, with what were described as positive results justifying the clay-to-alumina conversion on a commercial basis.4’ Advocates of the process have urged implementation, proposing a complex with a capacity of 1 million tonnes of alumina and 6 million tonnes of cement, 45 but such a project has yet to be approved by the Soviet planning authorities. Angren kaolin was originally envisaged as a potential source of alumina for the Regar aluminium plant, which went on stream in 1975, using alumina presumably from foreign sources.
1976
231
RONImaterial problems of the Soviet aluminium
industry
Raw-material
Soviet Aluminium 46Shabad, The Industry, op tit Reference 1, pp 9-l 0. Soviet Aluminium 41 Shabad, Developments in 1959, op tit Reference 1, pp 6-J. 48 Vneshnyaya Torgovlya, June 1976, p
12. Source: Vneshnyaya torqovlya SSSR (Foreign Trade of the USSR), statistical vearbook. Moscow, 1965-l 976. A portion of the increased imports from Guinea in 1975 was stockpiled pending completion of additional alumina-making capacity at Kirovabad and ultimately at Nikolayev. Table 2. Bauxite
GW?Ca Yugoslavia Turkey Guinea Total
232
imports of the Soviet Union
imports
The Soviet Union began importing Hungarian bauxite in the early postwar years. The ore moved by rail over a distance of nearly 4000km to the Urals alumina plants, reaching a peak of 560 000 tonnes in 1950, or about one-fourth of the Soviet Union’s total bauxite supply. Hungary also provided up to about 40 000 tonnes of alumina for the Ukraine’s Zaporozh’ye aluminium plant, where metal production resumed in 1949, but the alumina section was not rebuilt until 1955.4” Both bauxite and alumina shipments ceased in 1955 as Hungary used increasing amounts of raw materials for a domestic alumina and aluminium industry, supplying most of the surplus to East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where aluminium industries were also developing. Beginning in 1955, Greece replaced Hungary as the Soviet Union’s bauxite producer,47 with average annual shipments of 450 000 tonnes in the 1960s rising to an average of 550 000 tonnes in the 1970s. Most of the Greek bauxite was converted into alumina at Zaporozh’ye for use in the local reduction plant and in the Transcaucasian aluminium plants at Sumgait and Yerevan. As the expanding aluminium industry made increasing demands on the Soviet raw-material base, the import programme was significantly expanded in the 1960s. In addition to Greek bauxite, ore-shipments began arriving in 1965 from Yugoslavia, which soon surpassed Greece as the principal supplier; in 1968 from Guinea, and in 1971 from Turkey. By the early 1970s the Soviet Union was importing an annual average of l-6 million tonnes of bauxite, or the equivalent of about 400 000 tonnes of aluminium (see Table 2). In the meantime the Soviet Union had assisted Guinea with the development of a 2.5 million tonne bauxite mining operation at Debele (near Kindia), with Soviet credits to be repaid in bauxite. Operation of the mine began in June 1974, and by the beginning of 1976 it had shipped over 2 million tonnes of bauxite to the USSR, including l-2 million tonnes in repayments of credits. 48 As a result of this massive flow of Guinean bauxite to Soviet Black Sea ports, total bauxite imports jumped dramatically from 1.6 million tonnes in 1974 to nearly 3.5 million tonnes in 1975 (Table 2). Beginning in 1967. as alumina capacity did not keep pace with aluminium capacity increases in Siberia, the Soviet Union also turned increasingly to alumina imports. Under an agreement with Hungary, the Hungarians began in 1967 to ship alumina to the Volgograd aluminium plant (which had first used Urals alumina after its completion in 1959) and took aluminium metal in return under a barter arrangement. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union was receiving an average of 350 000 tonnes of Hungarian alumina, and exporting over IO0 000 tonnes of aluminium metal to Hungary. Other long-term sources of alumina for the Soviet Union have been the
(thousand
tonnes)
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
449
481 124
427 360
430 647
457 721
529 827
615 814
605
787
1077
55 1233
44 1400
119 1548
441 794 152 328 1714
635 690 148
449
526 600 76 211 1413
503 664 203 253 1623
611 947 75 1844 3477
RESOURCES
1473
POLICY
December
1976
Raw material problems of the Soviet aluminium industry Table 3. Alumina
imports of the Soviet union
1967
Source: (Foreign
Vneshnyaya Trade of the
torgovlya SSSR USSR), statistical
yearbook. Moscow, 1965-l columns do not add up rounding.)
976. Some because of
Hungary Greece United States Jamaica Trinidad France Guinea Yugoslavia Guvana T&key Italy India
(thousand
tonnes)
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
148 28 194
169 38 354
202
161
244
345
323
405
291
447 20
243
206 79
85 143
114 169
134 62 26
82 127 51
121 38 76 47
51 903
75 886
59 1029
89 22 53
160 18
29 5
3
Others Total
168
388
596
25 518
127 755
51 698
United States (beginning in 1967), and shipments from Jamaica, Guyana, Turkey and Italy started in 1973. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union was importing as much as one million tonnes of alumina. the equivalent of 500 000 tonnes of aluminium metal (Table 3). Combined raw material imports thus represented about 950 000 tonnes of aluminium production, or 40% of Soviet output. This represented a significant increase in the role of imports over the last decade. In 1965 the Soviet Union derived about 150 000 tonnes of aluminium from imported materials, 15% of total production. Table 4, which reconstructs the raw-material balance of the Soviet aluminium industry, shows that the contribution of the domestic bauxite-mining industry - essentially the Urals and the Arkalyk area of northwest Kazakhstan - has been steadily declining, from 70% in 1965 to about 50% in 1970 and 37% in 1975. In the five-year period from 1965 to 1970, the principal increment was provided by a steep surge in imports, which rose from 15% of the total raw-material supply to 38%. During the five-year period from 1970 to 1975, as the new nepheline-based alumina plant at Achinsk came on stream, nonbauxitic materials provided the principal increment, rising from 12% of the total raw-material supply in 1970 to 23% in 1975.
Outlook for the future Recent
statements
Table 4. Raw material 1 O6 tonnes)
Source: Author’s calculations. Actual bauxite imports in 1975 were 1 ,7 x lo6 tonnes in alumina equivalent, of which about one-half is believed to have been stockpiled.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
in
the
Soviet
press
balance of the Soviet aluminium
industry
suggest
a
(in alumina
general
equivalent
of
1965
%
1970
%
1975
%
Domestic materials Bauxite Nepheline Alunite
1.7 1.4 0.3 -
85 70 15 _
2.1 1.7 0.3 0.1
62 50 9 3
2-9 1.8 0.9 0.2
60 37 19 4
Imported materials Bauxite Alumina
0.3 0.3 -
15 16 _
1.3 0.8 0.5
38 23 15
1.9 0.9 I.0
40 19 21
Total alumina
2.0
100
3.4
100
4.8
100
equivalent
Total aluminium
1976
1 ,o
1.7
2.4
233
Raw material problems of the Soviet alutninium industry
@Pravda Ukrainy, 28 December 1973; Pravda, 29 September 1975. 5oSovetskaya Rossiya, .I 8 August 1975; 3 February 1976. 5’ Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, No 5, 1975, p 13. See also Paul Dibb. Siberia and the Pacihc. New York, Praeger. 1972, p 264.
234
disenchantment with non-bauxitic domestic raw materials, both on technological and economic grounds. Having completed the two principal non-bauxitic projects - Achinsk nepheline and Kirovabad alunite ~ that had been designed in the late 19SOs, the Soviet aluminium planners now appear to be turning increasingly to imported raw materials as a source for future expansion of the industry. In addition to the planned bauxite-based expansion of the Kirovabad alumina plant, a new alumina plant is under construction on the Black Sea coast of the Ukraine. This plant, with an estimated capacity ‘of 1 million tonnes, is situated at Zhovtnevoye, a southern suburb of Nikolayev. 4y It will process Guinean bauxite. Nikolayev alumina is to be hauled by railway over a distance of nearly 4800km to the Sayanogorsk aluminium plant, with an estimated capacity of 500 000 tonnes. The Sayanogorsk plant is scheduled to go into operation in conjunction with the adjacent Sayan hydro-electric station, now scheduled for first power production in 1978.50 Soviet planners have also recommended the construction of a second seaboard alumina plant on the Pacific coast. This plant, which would be built in the 1980s would have a capacity of 1.1 million tonnes of alumina and would be located at a site yet to be determined in the Maritime Territory of the Soviet Far East. It would process imported bauxite. possibly from Australia, and ship its alumina to the aluminium plants of southern Siberia. The long-term Soviet intention is to re-export aluminium metal to countries in the Pacific basin.51 Such an operation would be greatly facilitated by the construction of the 3200km Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway, to be completed in the early 1980s. This new railway, running parallel to, and north of, the present Trans.Siberian Railway, is designed mainly to open up new Siberian resource sites for export through Pacific ports. Much of the traffic on the BAM railway would thus be eastbound, making it particularly suitable for hauling large volumes of alumina from the coast westward to the Siberian reduction plants. Over the long run, the growing hydra-electric complex of southern Siberia may well hecomc one of the world’s leading aluminium reduction centres, importing raw material and re-exporting metal.
RESOURCES
POLICY
December
1976