Coal Ash an alternative for bauxite!

Necessity gives rise to invention and the scarcity of domestic bauxite reserve in China is making people from aluminium industry think about an alternative. Yin Zhonglin who is the director of Chalco Zhengzhou Research Institute Alumina Institute said at the World Aluminum Raw Materials Summit 2012 that when confronted with tight bauxite resource in domestic and increased bauxite export tariff in Indonesia, coal ash was likely to be a vital alternate resource of bauxite.

According to his introduction now there were more than 100 items of patents that related to coal ash extract alumina. Since 2010 Chalco has already adopted comprehensive utilization of coal ash to extract alumina. China with sufficient high aluminum coal resources, rich aluminum powder coal ash which contains 30-50% of alumina account for one third of the whole resources, it is a kind of alternate resource in the production of alumina. According to the existing annual production that the application of coal ash can meet the demand of 12,000-20,000 thousand tons of alumina.

He also stated that at present the annual production of 300 thousand tons alumina factory has put into production, another 400 thousand tons still in construction can be put into production in August 2012. In addition to this, another 1000 thousand tons of factory that took coal ash as raw material was started construction at the end of 2011 expected to finished in 2013.