PRESS CENTRE / CALENDAR / THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN ALUMINIUM INDUSTRY


THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN ALUMINIUM INDUSTRY

RUSSIAN ALUMINIUM: HOW IT ALL BEGAN…

Aluminium  - the Strategic Metal

These days, it is a challenge  to find an industry which does not use aluminium and its alloys: the increase in the use of aluminium has surpassed any other metal in recent times. This year, the Russian aluminium industry celebrates its 75th anniversary.

To mark this event, United Company RUSAL is launching a weekly magazine called ‘Urals Aluminium’, containing historical essays from leading Russian writer Nikolay Golden, who is also a professional aluminium metallurgist.   Nikolay is a member of the Writers Union of the USSR and Russia, the author of several books on the aluminium industry and the head of the vocational guidance unit and the museum of the Volkhov smelter. 

Production of aluminium metal was initially launched and motivated by the military needs of states during periods of international armed conflict, which acted as catalyst to rapid growth of the industry.  The first aluminium smelter in the world operating on the basis of the Henry St. Clair Deville method was built in France in the middle of the 19th century following generous subsidies from the treasury of the emperor Napoleon III. The French military strategists wanted their army to wear light aluminium armour which would protect from the rifle bullets of that time. Additional military uses of the metal included powder aluminium, which at the end of the 19th century became a mandatory component in the production of ammonal – an explosive substance used in artillery shells, bombs and mines.

For decades, Russia’s engineering and academic elite advised the government to build at least one aluminium smelter in Russia – but the country continued to import the metal while many of Russia’s technological advances found wide application abroad.  There are many examples to speak of.

• In the 19th Century, a quarter of the world’s aluminium output was produced by the smelters in France and Germany using the method proposed by the professor of the Kharkov University N. Beketov.   
• Since 1893, all of the largest alumina refineries in the world have operated using the Karl Bayer process. Bayer obtained a license for his method of extracting aluminium oxide from low-silicon bauxites when he worked as a chemistry engineer at the Tenteleyev plant in St. Petersburg.
• In France and Belgium, two alumina refineries were constructed following the design developed by the Russian engineer D. Penyakov. 
• In 1910-1912 P. Phedotiev, a professor of the Petersburg Polytechnic University carried out fundamental research and developed a detailed theory of electric metallurgy of aluminium and due to his work it transformed into one of the areas of world science.

Against this backdrop of growing Russian expertise and at the height of economic development of the Russian empire, N. Poushin, a professor of the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University submitted a request to the Russian Ministry of Trade and Industry to allocate five thousand roubles to continue research to produce aluminium  “with the use of exclusively Russian materials – in other words,. materials of Russian origin”. His request was declined. At the same time, the Russian government allocated several million roubles in gold to import 1, 846 tonnes of aluminium. It is difficult to speculate on the motivation behind this decision -  the short-sighted principle of ‘no man is a prophet in his own country’ or the ubiquitous wish of the civil servants to have their slice of the state-owned cake? It is most likely that it was a combination of both.

Russia "without an aluminium doctrine"

With no aluminium industry of its own, Russia was spending staggering sums of money to import the metal. Not only did Russia have no means of producing the vital metal, it was paying a premium for it - the world market price for one tonne of aluminium ingots was about 2,000 roubles, while in Russia the same tonne of metal cost from 5 to 7 thousand.

As businessmen and fraudsters across the country tried to tap into an increasingly lucrative industry, public uproar caused by the ‘aluminium’ frauds forced the tsar government to start seizure of aluminium all around the country in all of its possible forms: ingots, products, powders and even contaminated cuttings. Subsequently, in January 1916 the Artillery Headquarters of the Russian Empire established an 'Administration for construction of aluminium smelters’, which was headed by a metallurgy professor of the Artillery Academy, A. Kourdyumov. However, it took nine months of  cutting through red tape before all the permits could be obtained from the regulatory authorities. Only by the end of September were the funds allocated after being reduced.

However, this did not mark the long-awaited birth of the Russian aluminium industry.  The Administration   responsible for the aluminium industry could not replace the production of aluminium itself which was now in a very uncertain state - it was all moving too slowly. Meanwhile, government officials signed a contract for aluminium supplies with the Norwegian Nitrides Company on January 27th. On delivery of the first batch of metal to Russia (1,200 tonnes) the Norwegian company served an ultimatum calling for a review of the transaction terms and requesting  an additional 225-300 million roubles in gold for aluminium supplies. Dozens of aluminium smelters could have been built with this money – the civil servants’ judgment had failed again.

The October Revolution of 1917 and the outbreak of the Civil War was a major catalyst in ending exploitation of this weakness by foreign and domestic players.

"For the purpose of the broad  development of the aluminium industry…"

To the credit of the Russian scientists and leading aluminium engineers, the dream of a national, fully functional aluminium industry was no abandoned despite civil unrest, mass emigration and the overall collapse of national production that created a severe obstacle to development. Work and research continued in a new economical and political environment of Soviet Russia.

Immediately after the Civil War was over, the Military Department of the Supreme Council of the National Economy re-established Prof. A. Kurdyumov’s Aluminium Commission. The Commission undertook to coordinate and plan all major R&D activities of national institutes, construction and equipment of large-scale pilot facilities intended to improve various production for alumina, aluminium, as well as collateral materials such as cryolite, fluoride salts and carbon electrodes, without which neither casting of the light metal nor a search for a sufficient ore base was possible.

From 1921-24, Prof. S. Malyavkin conducted a thorough exploration of the Tikhvin region and found large industrial deposits of high-silicon bauxite. Back then, there was not a single alumina company in the world that would work with such ‘cast-off’ raw materials. In spite of the negative assessment of international experts, a group of scientists at the Leningrad National Institute of Applied Chemistry (GIPKh) including Prof. A. Yakovkin, researchers I. Lileyev, F. Strokov and V. Mazel, developed an innovative method for recovering alumina by baking high-silicon bauxite with soda and lime – hence called GIPKh method -  which was later used at the Volkhov refinery, the first Russian alumina refinery, and then at the Tikhvin refinery.

At the same time, two professors at the Leningrad Mining Institute, A. Kuznetsov and E. Zhukovsky, were supervising the project of alumina electrothermal recovery on the same bauxite from the Tikhvin region. The method was later tested on the pilot equipment of the Institute of Applied Mineralogy’s Tsaritsyno Pilot Station in the Moscow region and was specifically designed to be used at the Dneprovskiy aluminium and alumina complex in Zaporozhye, where cheap energy generated by the Dnieper HEP made its utilisation economically viable.

The final stage of aluminium production – electrolysis – from laboratory tests to the actual reduction process using industrial equipment, was solely enabled by P. Fedotyev, a professor at the St. Petersburg  (Leningrad ) Polytechnic Institute, supported by a large group of his co-workers and students.

On August 2nd, 1929 , the Council of People’s Commissars passed a resolution to initiate construction of two aluminium facilities to be fed with electricity generated by the Volkhov and Dnieper HEPs. The next challenge for the project designers was to select a type of electrolytic cells that produce aluminium.

In just six months, Prof. Fedotyev and his students in Leningrad erected a large pilot aluminium smelter that had twenty different types of cells. The type that proved most effective would be selected as a prototype for a future nation-wide reduction cell. Another objective of the pilot smelter was to train qualified and skilled personnel, both operators and managers. So, in June 1930, one month after the pilot cells produced their first aluminium, the construction of the Volkhov aluminium smelter that comprised both an alumina refinery and an aluminium smelter started.

On May 14th, 1932, two years into intensive work by nine thousand workers, the Volkhov smelter produced the first Soviet industrial aluminium. 12 days later, on May 26th, the Council of the People’s Commissars issued Resolution #812/192/C to begin preparatory works for the construction of a 50,000-tpa aluminium combine in the Urals.

The opening paragraph of this Resolution made a triumphant and confident statement: "For the purpose of the broad development of the aluminium industry…".