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Aluminum
Although the aluminum industry in Canada is less than fifty years old, the
world’s largest aluminum smelter is located here because of hydro-electric
power resources. The making of aluminum requires more electrical power
than any other commercial process, each ton of ingot requiring enough elec-
tricity to service the average six-room house for seventeen years. Bauxite,
the basic ore, is mined by open pit methods in British Guiana and sent 3,000
miles by boat to Arvida in northeastern Quebec. Other raw materials required,
such as cryolite, fluorspar and petroleum coke, come from Greenland, New-
foundland and the gulf coast of the United States. At Arvida on the Saguenay
River some 80 miles north of Quebec City, the bauxite ore is first refined by
chemical processing to make alumina, a soft white powder. The alumina is
next reduced to metallic aluminum in large steel boxes lined with carbon.
Heavy electric currents passing from carbon anodes, through a bath of molten
cryolite in which the alumina is dissolved, to the carbon lining of the steel pot,
cause the aluminum metal to dissociate from the alumina and collect in the
bottom of the pot. The metal is drawn off at intervals, and cast into the
familiar 20-kilogram ingot used in manufacturing processes all over the
world.
Some 15% of the aluminum ingot produced at Arvida remains in Canada
where about a thousand manufacturers make it into consumer products
ranging from flashlights to battleship superstructures, from thumbtacks to
box cars. The bulk of Canadian ingot is shipped abroad, where its sale makes
an important contribution to Canada’s export trade.
The city of Arvida, Quebec, where many of The Aluminum Company
of Canada’s 6,000 workers have their homes, is a model-planned com-
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