JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Sydney-, Johannesburg- and London-listed South32 on Wednesday reported Australian government environmental approval for the Worsley Mine Development Project Down Under.

South32’s Hillside Aluminium in Richards Bay, South Africa, the largest aluminium smelter in the southern hemisphere, beneficiates bauxite from the existing Worsley alumina operation into primary aluminium for domestic and export markets.

Aluminium is made by crushing and refining bauxite – an aluminium ore – into a white alumina powder then smelting the white alumina powder into aluminium metal, and Hillside enables local downstream manufacturing of aluminium products for domestic and industrial markets.

Approved under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999, the new Australian project will provide access to bauxite to sustain production at Worsley, with mining of bauxite areas located near South32’s existing operations expected to begin in the fourth quarter of its 2025 financial year (FY). Development of new mining areas, which are expected to sustain production to at least FY2036, will now also commence.

"The Federal Government's approval of the Worsley Mine Development Project is a positive outcome for Worsley Alumina and its workforce, the Peel and South West communities, and the local economy,” South32 CEO Graham Kerr stated in a media release to Mining Weekly.

Worsley Alumina has been operating for more than 40 years and is one of the region’s largest employers, supporting jobs for thousands of workers and contractors.

The Aluminium Stewardship Initiative has awarded Worsley Alumina multiple certifications against its global standards for responsible production of alumina, a vital component in the production of aluminium which is a metal critical to the global energy transition.

"We look forward to executing the project in accordance with the approvals granted by the Federal and Western Australian governments," Kerr added.

South32, which also has smelters producing aluminium in Mozambique and Brazil, has increased its exposure to low-carbon aluminium.

Solutions to support decarbonisation, while ensuring operational competitiveness into the future, are continuing to be intensely investigated at Hillside, which last year signed a 15-year lease agreement with South Africa’s Transnet National Ports Authority.

Aluminium is often glibly referred to as being half electricity and the electricity being used to produce aluminium at Hillside is coal-fired, which is destined to have marketing implications given Europe's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) penalising the entry of aluminium produced with unclean electricity.

Against that background, renewable and low-carbon energy sources are needed at Hillside, which directly and indirectly supports more than 31 000 jobs and contributes nearly R10-billion to South Africa’s GDP.

With the power agreement expiring in 2031, the transition to a low-carbon energy source is seen to be technologically and commercially complex owing to the smelter’s constant high energy demand.

Crucially, work is under way with South Africa's State-owned power utility Eskom, government, and commercial partners to develop and implement an energy solution at the scale required for the large aluminium smelter.

The potential to enter into a pilot agreement to purchase energy attributes associated with electricity generated at the Koeberg nuclear power station is part of a nonbinding memorandum of understanding (MoU) that has been signed with Eskom.

This MoU with Eskom centres on allowing Hillside to maintain aluminium supply from South Africa to Europe without CBAM turning that into a non-competitive proposition.

South Africa’s pace of aluminium exportation needs to continue to benefit from the higher intensity of aluminium use in battery electric vehicles (BEVs), substitution of plastics in packaging and the increasing use of aluminium in renewables.

Aluminium intensity in BEVs is said to be 40% higher than in internal combustion engine vehicles, from 111 kg/car in 2020 to 256 kg/car in 2050, owing to heavy BEV batteries requiring the light-weighting that aluminium provides.

Hillside will be uncompetitive in the 1.5 °C scenario without an affordable source of low-carbon energy, while the carbon impact on South32’s Mozal Aluminium in Mozambique would be lower given its access to clean energy.

Just energy transition considerations for Hillside require the switch to low-carbon energy to be planned in collaboration with a broad range of government and community stakeholders.