ELYSIS marked the start of construction on its Research and Development Center in Saguenay on Friday 16th August.
Technical experts will continue to advance the breakthrough technology that eliminates all direct greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from the aluminium smelting process.
Representatives from the governments of Québec and Canada and senior leaders from ELYSIS, Alcoa and Rio Tinto attended the event at the planned facility, located within Rio Tinto's Complexe Jonquière, the site of the Arvida smelter, Vaudreuil refinery and Arvida Research and Development Centre. The $50 million (CAD) construction project is expected to be fully operational in the second half of 2020, employing 25 technical experts.
Created thanks to a ground-breaking partnership between two global industry leaders, Alcoa and Rio Tinto, the ELYSIS joint venture is at the heart of a new revolutionary process to make aluminium. This disruptive process, supported in its development by Apple, will eliminate all direct GHG emissions from the traditional aluminium process, and instead emit pure oxygen. The ELYSIS™ technology has the potential to considerably reduce the environmental footprint of the global aluminium industry.
ELYSIS will continue to work closely with the Rio Tinto technology design team in France and Alcoa's Technical Center (ATC), near Pittsburgh in the United States, where this patented technology was invented by Alcoa. Since 2009, Alcoa has been producing research-scale metal at ATC with no direct carbon emissions from the smelting process.
Alcoa's Technical Center provides support to ELYSIS for the materials used to manufacture proprietary materials for the new anodes and cathodes that are essential to the ELYSISTM process. The Rio Tinto technology team in France is creating commercial scale designs for the ELYSIS™ technology so it can be retrofitted into existing smelters or used for new ones.