Aluminum—Product of Frontiers
By “Awake!” correspondent in Canada
A GIANT consuming unbelievable quantities of food day after day, hour after hour—that well describes an aluminum smelter. Its meat is the primary ore of aluminum, bauxite, or its by-product, alumina. Whichever one, there must be a constant supply flowing through, and at the same time vast quantities of electric power must be available. To establish a smelter area, then, there must be a major source of electric power and also a good port close by.
Would a location with these facilities be suitable near some large city? No, because other consumers would be making large demands on the power source. An aluminum smelter must have practically exclusive use of the power supply. This is why the aluminum industry is usually a pioneer of frontier country.
To a large extent, the determining factors for choosing a smelter site are geography and a climate with sufficient precipitation to ensure a steady volume of water. Norway’s only aluminum smelter takes advantage of power generated by water dropping 2,735 feet from the surrounding mountains.
In Ghana, the Volta River has been dammed by a hydroelectric generating station to supply an aluminum smelter and a plant for processing one of the world’s largest deposits of bauxite into alumina. The mountainous region of Minas Gerais state in Brazil at Curo Preto has three modern hydroelectric plants supplying a smelter that obtains its bauxite only one kilometer distant from the operation.
Fifty years ago at Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, the industry installed a large generating plant and smelter in the back country of the St. Maurice River valley, one hundred miles west of Quebec city. A few years later, north of that city a power plant and smelter were constructed on the Saguenay River at Isle Maligne. Shortly afterward Arvida, a few miles east on the same river, saw the beginnings of the world’s largest aluminum smelter—one that opened to industry the once-closed country of the Saguenay. Now on Canada’s west coast, part of the hinterland of British Columbia has been opened up by the Kitimat smelter installations of the Aluminum Company of Canada.
Opening New Frontiers
In Guyana, country of the fabled El Dorado, immense deposits of alumina-rich mineral have been developed. For fifty-four years the reddish-brown ore has been blasted out of beds averaging fifteen to forty-five feet in thickness. By 1958 the area around the community of Mackenzie was producing 300,000 tons of bauxite annually. Today the storage bins at its modern docks load almost three million tons yearly into vessels bound for Quebec’s Saguenay smelters.
Ten years ago few people had ever heard of Weipa on the far-northern coast of Queensland, Australia. In 1955 an Australian geologist discovered in this isolated area what has turned out to be the world’s largest deposit of bauxite. Seventy-three square miles were already blocked out by 1968 with 516 million tons of proven ore reserves. Scout drilling over another 160 square miles revealed a potential of 1,200 million tons. Suddenly, Australia was in the bauxite business to an extent that made the aluminum industry around the world sit up and take notice.
The Weipa mining operation is very simple. When the layer of ore is reached, at times 30 feet thick, no blasting is needed. Loaders simply lift it out of its bed and onto 50-ton aluminum-body dump trucks. It is taken to the beneficiation plant where the ore grade is improved by sizing and washing. Conveyor belts then take the washed, treated ore to an open stockpile, from where a conveyor loading system transfers it to ore ships.
Already over $40,000,000 had been spent on this development by last year. In addition to the modern plant and harbor works, there is a new community housing over 350 people, with air-conditioned homes, a school, stores, a theater, police and hospital services. From being a wilderness in 1957 Weipa is now one of the top bulk-material shipping ports of Australia. Maximum capacity of the installation in 1963 was half a million tons annually. This figure rose to four million tons in 1968, and is contemplated to reach seven million tons annually by early in the seventies.
Thus in Guyana and Australia new frontiers have been opened up. But in these, as with other countries, the spread of industry to frontier areas has not been an unmixed blessing. Trees and vegetation are knocked down, and open-pit mines replace the wilderness beauty. Of course, the Creator put into the earth minerals for man to use, and how rich indeed this earth is in mineral wealth! It is also God’s purpose that this earth be a Paradise. But man in his exploitation of the mineral resources of the earth often leaves unsightly scars and makes portions of the land a desolate waste. He has not solved the problem of using earth’s resources without marring the beauty of his earthly home.
The Kitimat Smelter
Interestingly, many thousands of tons of alumina from Australian bauxite will soon be feeding the potlines of Canada’s Kitimat smelter.
In a rugged retreat of Canada’s Coast Mountains stand the Kitimat smelter and power plant. The project was a triumph of engineering skill and the work of 7,500 men. It began to unfold in the spring of 1951 when work started on a scheme that was to cost $440 million by the time it was completed. Never before had so much money been spent in Canada on a single private undertaking. Current plans call for the smelter to attain an annual production of 550,000 tons of aluminum ingot, so making it the world’s largest.
Three years after construction began on this vast complex, a gleaming aluminum ingot weighing fifty pounds came off the potline. Kitimat was in operation! The smelter itself was built on what were formerly tidal flats on the Kitimat Arm of Douglas Channel. A modern townsite took shape seven miles up the valley from the smelter. An ocean port, railway line and modern highway were also constructed to serve the smelter and the new town.
The Kenney Dam
A constant downward flow of water was required to produce the power for the smelter. That meant impounding the waters of all the lakes of a plateau some 130 miles long. Up to November 1952, those waters flowed east to join the Fraser River system in its passage to the Pacific near Vancouver. At the western end of the plateau Tahtsa Lake was prevented from spilling its waters into the Pacific, only twenty miles away, by the solid rock barrier of 7,000-foot Mount Dubose. In order to form a reservoir of sufficient volume to serve the power plant that was envisioned, a 325-foot-high dam was needed to block the eastern outlet of the plateau, the Nechako River. Hence the Kenney Dam came into being.
Before work on the dam could get going, a 60-mile access road from Vanderhoof rail station had to be built through muskeg and bush as well as 45 miles of material supply roads. A 3,000-foot runway was also provided for ferrying men and material from Vancouver, three hours away by air. The dam, at completion, was 1,500 feet long, 1,500 feet wide at its base and tapering to forty feet at its crest. It became the third-highest rock-fill dam in the world.
Five years later there were five and a half cubic miles more water in the basin than before the dam was built. But now this water had to be made to fall a half mile from the west end of Tahtsa Lake to the powerhouse level on the Kemano River ten miles farther west. A waterfall was needed.
Waterfall Inside a Mountain
How was that achieved? Well, while the Kenney Dam was still being prepared, work also began on Mount Dubose. A ten-mile tunnel was dug into the face of the mountain from the west end of Tahtsa Lake. Its diameter was twenty-five feet. At the same time two 17-foot-diameter tunnels were drilled and blasted from the powerhouse level upward at an angle of 48° to meet the west end of the tunnel in the heart of Mount Dubose. Inside these tunnels sections of steel pipe, 28 feet long and having a diameter of 11 feet, were welded together to form the conduits, both 2,600 feet long. Broken rock and concrete were introduced around the outside of these conduits to hold them firmly in place.
Each penstock or conduit led to a manifold with four five-foot-diameter branches leading to the waterwheels of the generators. Tailrace tunnels from each generator were drilled and blasted out beneath the powerhouse floor, and these finally joined the 27-foot-wide main tailrace tunnel that discharges the spent water into the Kemano River and thence to the Pacific.
Thus waters that once flowed to the east now flow west to operate what is planned to be one of the largest privately owned power plants on the continent. The resultant waterfall within the mountain is, in fact, some sixteen times the height of Niagara Falls.
Powering the Smelter
Not only is the waterfall inside Mount Dubose, but the powerhouse itself is a cavern in which, for length, the oceangoing Queen Elizabeth I could easily fit. When finally completed for planned full capacity its measurements are to be 1,135 feet long, 85 feet wide and 145 feet high. It is to have sixteen generating units turning out 2,400,000 horsepower of electricity. The ventilating system of this vast plant has to operate continuously, pushing 76,000 cubic feet of air per minute onto the operating and main floors.
Connecting with the smelter, 51 miles away, special aluminum power lines with steel reinforcement traverse some really rugged country including the 5,300-foot Kildala Pass. To build the line required construction of a road of which the final six miles climb to the summit at a grade of 1,000 feet to each mile. It took 309 towers to carry the line. The line itself, because of the exposure to gales, snow- and ice storms, was built to withstand a load of 40 pounds to each foot of length. The cable itself, for most of the distance, weighs a little better than two pounds per foot, while the portion going over the Kildala Pass weighs almost five pounds per foot and has a diameter of just over two and a quarter inches.
Finally the job was completed. The switches at the switchyards at each end of the line were closed. The power came through in a mighty surge to activate the potlines of the smelter. As the gleaming silvery metal began to flow from the pots into the casting wheel where the ingots are formed, another chapter was written in the fascinating story of aluminum, product of frontiers.