EGA leaders congratulate team that delivered historic first UAE industrial technology export project

Emirates Global Aluminium has recognised more than 100 employees who contributed to the success of the company’s historic export of UAE-developed industrial technology to Aluminium Bahrain.

EGA’s Managing Director Abdulla Kalban and Chief Executive Officer Abdulnasser Bin Kalban led the congratulations at a ceremony in Dubai.

EGA won a competitive international tender in 2016 to supply smelting technology to ALBA for its Line 6 expansion project. The win made EGA the first UAE industrial company to license its core process technology internationally and was a landmark in the development of a knowledge-based economy in the UAE.

As part of the technology transfer agreement, EGA provided experts from its Technology Development and Transfer team, as well as from Operations, to support the construction and commissioning of Line 6 in Bahrain.

Some 40 EGA employees worked on the project in Bahrain during the almost three years of construction and commissioning, with dozens more supporting the effort from EGA’s sites in the UAE.

In December, EGA’s technology at Line 6 passed a final performance guarantee test, with results exceeding EGA’s commitments under the technology transfer agreement.

EGA’s Managing Director, Abdulla Kalban, said: “The transfer of EGA’s UAE-developed industrial technology to Bahrain was a major undertaking, requiring many of our staff to spend long periods abroad working hard to meet challenging deadlines, without ever compromising on safety or quality. We are proud of our team’s fantastic work, which catapulted EGA into an elite global league of aluminium companies that earn revenue from their technology innovation as well as their metal. This project was significant not just for EGA, but for the UAE.”

EGA also invited 21 staff from ALBA’s Production and Maintenance departments to the UAE for hands-on-training using EGA technologies.

EGA has developed smelting technology in the UAE for more than 25 years. The company has used its own UAE-developed technology in every smelter expansion since the 1990s and retrofitted all its older production lines.

ALBA selected EGA’s 10th generation technology, DX+ Ultra, which is amongst the most efficient in the global aluminium industry. In the final performance test at ALBA, EGA’s technology operated at 465kA. Specific energy consumption was 12.87 kilowatt hours per kilogram of aluminium produced.