Orbite sets one-year deadline for Gaspé alumina plant

Glenn Kelly and his 75-strong team at Montreal-based Orbite Aluminae Inc. face a critical one-year deadline to complete a commercial-scale high-purity alumina (HPA) plant at Cap Chat in Quebec’s Gaspé.

“It’s a race against time to master some technical hurdles and bring the plant into production,” Orbite’s CEO Glenn Kelly said in an interview.

The HPA project is about a year behind. Kelly said he wants to see the plant completed early in 2015 and running at top efficiency.

More than $100 million will have been invested in the project since its inception in 2007, he added. The plant will use Orbite’s internationally patented process to make up to 99.999 per cent-pure alumina for the electronics, ceramics and coatings industries and products such as LED lighting and sapphire glass for cellphone screens.

(Alumina is the intermediate material for producing primary aluminum metal).

The plant will have initial annual capacity of 1,100 tonnes, rising to 1,800 tonnes later. The ultrapure alumina fetches $25,000 to $30,000 U.S. a tonne at present and the plant will provide Orbite with much-needed cash flow to back its future growth.

Orbite’s process does not produce the toxic “red mud” that is the hallmark of bauxite-based alumina plants worldwide.

The HPA’s acid-regeneration technology covers the extraction of alumina and other valuable elements from Gaspé clays and other feedstocks. It could also remediate fly ash, a product of coal-fired power plants.

The technology may later be adapted for a large commercial plant to supply lower-grade “cleantech” alumina to the aluminum smelting industry.

This week Investissement Québec, the province’s industrial financing arm, said it is taking a $10-million equity stake in Orbite after receiving a favourable independent engineering assessment of the HPA process. It will become one of Orbite’s major shareholders.

This follows a $4-million interest-free federal government loan to cover replacement of the plant’s poorly performing calcination unit, a key part of the purification process.

“Tenders are expected soon from German and Japanese specialized machinery firms for the supply of the new calcinator,” Kelly said. “It’s a big piece of equipment ... and including installation at the Cap Chat site the job will take several months.”

Orbite’s technology centre in Laval employs nine professionals and technicians and is working closely with the company’s Montreal headquarters and the engineers and construction people on the site at Cap Chat. The HPA plant is producing batches of alumina for potential customers for testing.

Red mud remediation and the lower-value smelter-grade (SGA) project are expected to follow, but Kelly would not venture any timetable or cost estimates for those ventures.

Red mud waste became a top international issue in October, 2010. One million cubic metres of red mud from a big Hungarian alumina plant ruptured a storage container wall, flooding the town of Kolontár, polluting several rivers and causing several deaths.

The plant used the traditional Bayer technology to process bauxite into alumina.

Orbite, in partnership with the European-based Veolia Environnement SA, plans eventually to offer its technology to clean up red mud at Bayer-type alumina plants worldwide, Kelly said. This would extend the lives of existing aluminum smelters.

Kelly, a Queen’s University engineer with a MBA from Laval University, has spent 25 years in the energy and resource sectors and joined Orbite last May as COO.