Aluminium smelting, Binzhou, Shandong
China concentrates about 57% of world aluminium smelting, capped at 45 Mt/year by Beijing, a cap almost reached. This smelting itself depends massively on Guinean bauxite: the world's dependence on China conceals a Chinese dependence on Conakry.
Aluminum is mostly electricity
A ton of primary aluminum is about 14 MWh of electricity run through an electrolysis cell, enough to power a European household for three to four years. The world map of aluminum is first a map of cheap electricity. A cell cannot be idled; stopping it for more than a few hours freezes the bath and destroys the line. Production must therefore run at baseload, day and night, which requires a dispatchable, continuous source.
In China, that source is coal, often produced by captive power plants attached to the smelters. The result: each Chinese ton emits around 20 t of CO₂, against 4 t for a hydroelectric ton, a gap that places Binzhou's aluminum squarely in the crosshairs of the European carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). The industrial dependence is also a climate dependence.
"Green" aluminum depends on the monsoon
To decarbonize without losing the crown, Beijing pushes its smelters toward Yunnan, a province saturated with hydropower. But dispatchable hydro depends on rain: the droughts of 2022 and 2023 there forced power cuts and the disconnection of more than a million tons of capacity, sending a wave through world LME prices.
By swapping coal for the dam, Chinese aluminum does not eliminate the risk: it shifts it from carbon to hydrology. With the 45 Mt cap nearly reached, any growth in demand, electric vehicles, grids, aerospace, runs into a frozen, weather-sensitive capacity. This cap imposed from above becomes a source of tension on a metal no one can do without.