I Like Smoke & Lightning, Heavy Metal Thunder, Part 2

John's paper reports that "Alcoa and Rio Tinto have partnered to develop a carbon-free aluminum smelting process that replaces the traditional carbon anode with a ceramic one, eliminating the resulting CO 2 emissions." Unfortunately "partnered to develop" doesn't mean much by itself. Efforts to develop inert (non-consumable) anodes for aluminum production have been on-going since the Hall-Heroult process first made aluminum production industrially feasible. It's been a high-priority research goal supported by the DOE since 1996. Hall himself experimented with copper anodes. They work for a while, but the copper dissolves into the molten cryolite too quickly for copper anodes to be practical. The best candidates to date, AFAIK, have been proprietary ceramic formulations containing copper. Something along that line is undoubtedly what Alcoa and Rio Tinto have "partnered to develop". How far they've progressed toward commercial deployment remains to be seen.

The stakes in this game are very high. Successful development of an inert anode -- along with a wettable cathode to go with it -- really would make a big difference in the cost and efficiency of primary aluminum production. And it would indeed save tens of millions of tons per year of CO2 emissions. What's more, it would open the door for aluminum to become a far superior alternative to hydrogen for long term energy storage.