Alcoa’s world-leading R&D role

Tucked away in Alcoa’s Kwinana alumina refinery complex, just south of Perth, is the largest refining research and development group in the Western world.

It is also the largest gathering of industrial scientists and engineers in Western Australia – 35 scientists, a dozen engineers and more than 30 scientific and other support staff, including the largest number of PhDs working together in the state outside of a university or the CSIRO.

The group is the Alcoa Technology Delivery Group, Alcoa World Alumina’s global R&D department, which is responsible for coming up with innovative processes and equipment for cleaner production and maximum efficiency at Alcoa refineries worldwide; nine refineries in five countries.

The ‘TDG’, as it is known, invests more than $20 million a year.

Its most recent coup has been a top national award for a major breakthrough in the way alumina refinery waste is processed, a new process that achieves the double benefit of making the waste potentially re-usable and neutralising a greenhouse gas.

Finding practical uses for new and stockpiled refinery residue, which has ongoing environmental land use impacts and significant storage costs, is one of the biggest challenges facing the global alumina industry.

The TDG’s residue carbonation process successfully lowers the alkalinity of the residue, the biggest barrier to its re-use, by bubbling unwanted waste gas carbon dioxide through the mix.

Alcoa hopes to implement full-scale carbonation of all residues at its Kwinana refinery this year using carbon dioxide piped direct from a neighbouring industry, thus diverting those emissions from the atmosphere.

This is expected to be the precursor for the process to become a best practice benchmark for refinery residue treatment and storage in the industry worldwide.

The process won Australia’s top environmental engineering award at last month’s 2005 Australian Engineering Excellence Awards after taking the major WA Engineering Innovation Award in August.

The project has opened up possibilities for re-using the more benign residue in areas from construction materials and concrete to soil amendments, and even fillers for plastics.

It follows years of research and the successful construction, monitoring and detailed evaluation of a major prototype at Alcoa’s Kwinana Refinery.

The carbonation process involves pumping refinery residue through a purpose-built plant where carbon dioxide is bubbled through the mix to reduce the pH to levels found naturally in many alkaline soils.

While carbonation is always occurring in nature, what makes the project unique and viable is that the research team has developed new technology to speed up the process.

Alcoa estimates that, once implemented, the greenhouse benefits at the Kwinana refinery will be equivalent to taking up to 12,000 cars off the road.

Carbonation is just one of the TDG’s success stories.

Others include the development of a robotically controlled process for analysing bauxite, which has significantly reduced bauxite waste, and innovative technology to dramatically reduce dust.

The research centre also sponsors universities across Australia to undertake associated research and is the major sponsor of the Centre for Sustainable Resource Processing at WA’s Curtin University, where it has committed $400,000 cash and $400,000 in kind each year for the next seven years.

Alcoa is also a foundation and the largest sponsor of the Parker Centre for Hydrometallurgy.