US aluminum producer Alcoa is finishing repair work on a rotary kiln at its Lake Charles, Louisiana, petroleum coke calciner, with the aim of restarting the facility in June for what would be the first time in almost 18 months, a spokesman for Alcoa said Monday.
Alcoa spokesman Jim Beck said by email the facility would start processing green petroleum coke in June and supply some of the company's aluminum smelters with calcined petcoke, which they in turn use to make carbon anodes, used as a carbon source in the aluminum smelting process. But Alcoa's carbon anode facility in Lake Charles will remain idled, Beck said.
The rotary kiln at the Lake Charles calciner failed on December 25, 2015. In January 2016, Alcoa said calcining operations at the plant were likely to be offline for at least five months.
At the time of the outage, the calciner produced about 250,000 mt/year of CPC for Alcoa's smelters, and sourced green coke from various oil refineries.
Over the last few months, Alcoa has reportedly been buying green petcoke in preparation for the restart, according to market sources.
