The usual bumper crowd turned out to Optus Stadium’s River Room on a chilly day in late July for a fireside chat with Alcoa’s recently minted President and VP of operations for Alcoa Australia, Elsabe Muller.

We encourage our guest speakers to educate us on some aspect of the industry and Elsabe certainly did precisely that. We learnt that Alcoa founders pioneered the metallurgical process for the manufacturing of aluminium, with the process developed by Charles Martin Hall still remaining the basis for today’s aluminium production. This deep history of metallurgical prowess remains embedded in the DNA of modern-day Alcoa, as seen by ongoing efforts to decarbonise the very energy intensive process of aluminium production. So what is aluminium used for other than stopping your hands from getting wet and sticky when drinking coca cola ? Other than cans, a quick search of your house will find plenty of the stuff, from foil trays, to foil wrapping for food, to gutters and roofs (think zincalume), window and door surrounds and furniture. Head outside and look up and you’re likely to see planes made lighter, more corrosion resistant and fuel-efficient owing to aluminium – ditto for cars, trains and ships. Turning our attention to decarbonisation efforts and we find aluminium is front and centre there too. Overhead power lines consist of a galvanised steel core surrounded by aluminium cables – the ideal blend of corrosion resistance, light weight and electrical conductivity. In turn these power lines provide the grid connectivity for dispersed renewable power generation activities such as wind turbines and solar panels (themselves clad in aluminium).

So, from a process developed by Charlie Hall back in 1886, the stuff is in ubiquitous demand for an array of uses, many of which are integral to decarbonisation efforts. It then seems an irony or at least a strong case of nimbyism that there should be such strong reaction to bauxite mining in WA’s jarrah forest. We learnt that if we don’t mine it here in WA (under the guidance of Alcoa’s international award-winning environmental practices), then mining will still happen elsewhere and almost certainly in even more ecologically sensitive sub-equatorial rainforested areas with all the commensurate poor environmental practices (think nickel mining in Indonesia). With the myriad programs that Alcoa fund and deploy within the WA community (including $15m invested into the Forest Research Centre that will build on almost 50 years of rehabilitationand environmental learnings), plus the wealth created through the alumina / bauxite industry in WA that exists to produce a meaningful chunk of the world’s aluminium requirements, we wish Alcoa a bright and prosperous future here in WA.

Thank you to Elsabe and team Alcoa for the passionate and factual presentation.