Why is money spent transporting aluminium ore to smelting sites rather than smelting it where it's mined?

Answer 1

It has to be moved sooner or later. Maybe it's being moved to where there are workers?

Answer 2

Aluminium ore is not smelted.!!!!
Aluminium ore is electrolysed in cryolite.
This requires large amounts of cheap electricity. So it is cheaper to carry aluminium oxide to the electrolysis plant than to cable the electricity to the point of mining.
If electricity was cabled to the mining plant, a large quantity of its energy would be lost. To avoid this loss electricity has to be transformed from low voltage/high amperage to high voltage/low amperage, and then transformed baack again - EXPENSE.
So it is cheaper to ship aluminiumm oxide to the electrolysis plant where there is a nearby cheap source of high amperage electric production.
At Holyhead (Wales - UK) there is a large electrolysis plant. The aluminium oxide (Bauxite) is shipped in from Jamaica (West Indies), but the electricity is produced cheaply, by hydro-electric plants and nuclear generators in North Wales.

Answer 3

Economies of scale.

Basically it's cheaper to run one smelting site and have the raw goods transferred there than build lots of small ones at source and then transfer the processed aluminium.

Smelting sites are more efficient at a larger scale.

Answer 4

Consider how a large company decides on where to build a smelting plant.

Answer 5

Aluminium is the most abundant metal however, it is also extremely expensive to purify..

It also depends what purification method they decide to use..

Bayer process/Wholer process

things they need to consider is what they want to do with the pure Al afterwards and what materials they want to use for the purification and what to do with any bi-products etc..

usually its cheaper to make a 1 gigantic purification plant and transport to it rather than lots of smaller purification plants on site.

Answer 6

Smelting requires very large amounts of cheap electricity!