Chinalco expands its international market with excellent technical and quality services

Not long ago, Chalco International Engineering Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of China Aluminum Corporation, signed a technology transfer and design contract for 1.25 million tons of electrolytic aluminum projects in India. This is the 8th overseas business contract signed by Chinalco in the first 10 months of this year. At this point, Chinalco has successively signed more than 10 contracts with four Indian companies. The alumina production capacity of the cooperation project will reach 4 million tons and the electrolytic aluminum production capacity will reach 2.5 million tons.

In India, there are cooperation projects with Chinalco from east to west and from north to south. In the Indian aluminum industry, Chinalco has become a well-known brand. How is Chinalco's “going out” and how can it be established in the international market? Not long ago, the reporter was invited to India and interviewed Chinalco's first technical output project.

An hour and a half flight from New Delhi, the capital of India, to Lapp, the capital of Chhattisgarh, and then a car ride to the east, driving on an idyllic rural road for about five hours, and arriving at a place called Koba. In the town, a tall chimney and a modern factory building are in sight. This is Bharat Aluminum Co., Ltd., which is a company with the reputation of India's famous VEDANTA company.

Into the plant area, a brand-new electrolytic aluminum production line with 320-kiloampere electrolyzer technology with independent intellectual property rights and a pre-baked anode technology with an annual output of 40,000-50,000 tons, and an adjacent 120,000 tons production capacity. The old factory from the roasting trough contrasted sharply. An Dejun, deputy director of China Aluminum International Guiyang Aluminum Magnesium Design and Research Institute, said that all indicators of the new production line have reached the international advanced level. Bharat Aluminium Technical Manager Schwarmi said: "At present, the new production line technologies are very stable and we are very satisfied. We are grateful to China for providing us with world-class technology."
Behind the success of the Bharat Aluminum Project is the hard work and hard work Chinalco has made for the first time. Chinalco concluded in the benchmarking with world-class peer companies that the gap between the major production indicators and the economic efficiency indicators is, in the final analysis, the gap in the technological level. To this end, the company's party group put forward the strategic plan of taking the technology as a support, taking a new road to industrialization, and the development goal of “creating a world-class enterprise and building a centuries-old shop of Chinalco”.

In the production of alumina, Chinalco has developed the process technology and equipment such as the soda lime sintering method, the hybrid method, the pure Bayer method, the beneficiation-Bayer method, and the lime-Bayer method, among which the raw material is diaspora. Bayer's production of alumina technology has reached the advanced level of similar foreign technology. In the production of electrolytic aluminum, after stepping development, Chinalco has a series of technologies and equipment ranging from 75/90 kA to 280/300/320 kA and 350 kA. The large-scale pre-baked anode electrolyzer technology has outstanding characteristics such as high current efficiency, low integrated power consumption, and low construction investment. Among them, the 350-kilo-am electrolyzer is the largest trough that has been put into process production in the world, and its operating index has reached the international advanced level.

Opportunity always favors prepared people. Since 2001, in participating in a number of foreign aluminum industry academic exchanges, China Aluminum International Guiyang Aluminum Magnesium Design and Research Institute learned that the Indian aluminum industry is in the development period of “borrowing foreign investment”. This provides a huge opportunity for the technical output of advanced technology countries in the aluminum industry. In January 2003, Chinalco International won the fierce competition and formally signed an agreement with Bharat Aluminum Corporation to provide the 320-kiloamp electrolytic cell technology with independent intellectual property rights to the company’s new 250,000-ton electrolytic aluminum project. Prebaked anode technology.

This is the first technical export order that Chinalco received and is the first time that China’s electrolytic aluminum technology has gone abroad. In this regard, Chinalco Corporation attaches great importance to the selection of a large number of outstanding professional and technical personnel and production management backbone, to guide India's project construction and production operations, party secretary, general manager Xiao Yaqing and other five senior management members went to work in India on site. On-site personnel must work side by side to overcome difficulties in climate, health, transportation, food, and language. With a wealth of domestic practical experience and excellent technical reserves, from the furnace building, commissioning to start, just 24 months, a large-scale modern electrolytic aluminum plant with advanced equipment and a beautiful environment has risen. On January 7, 2005, the success of a power-on commissioning caused widespread concern in the Indian aluminum industry.

Excellent technology and reasonable prices are important prerequisites for technological output. However, China Aluminum will not succeed if it does not put in place a high-quality tracking service. The fact that the Bharat Aluminum project was successfully commissioned at one time and did not make China Aluminum people immersed in the joy of the moment. According to the experience of new domestic projects, a new factory needs to have a run-in period for smooth and continuous production. During this period, there will be many unexpected problems.

The problems that occurred after the Indian project went into production were that they had never encountered before in the country. Due to the lack of power supply in the location of the aluminum plant, power outages often occur. The specialists dispatched by Guiyang Aluminum Magnesium Design and Research Institute and China Aluminum Guangxi Branch entered the site for post-service, actively cooperated with the factory personnel, and stopped once for electric insurance. Only a major power outage on May 17 last year caused 126 electrolyzers to stop, leaving the plant almost paralyzed. At this critical moment, Chinalco promptly sent experts and technicians from China to help the Indian side repair and restart, and to find out the root causes of the problems in the local conditions, research solutions, and provide the Indian with newly developed technical control software. . After more than four months of painstaking and meticulous work, the factory fully resumed normal production. In September 2006, it successfully passed the performance assessment. A group of excellent indicators surprised the Indian counterpart: current efficiency was 94.8%, direct current consumption was 13,413 kWh, and metal purity was 99.74%. Bharat Aluminium President Su Rui said sensibly: "In our most difficult time, Chinalco has helped a lot, and Chinese experts are friends!"

Quality service has earned trust. The Bharat Aluminum project is not only a successful practice in the export of Chinalco's technology, but also a successful example of Sino-Indian economic and trade cooperation. The success of the Bharat Aluminum project has enabled Chinalco to gain a reputation in the Indian market. Out of the trust of Chinalco, India's Vedanta soon delegated another 500,000 tons of electrolytic aluminum project to Chinalco, not only continuing to use Chinalco's large-scale electrolytic aluminum technology, but also providing hundreds of millions of dollars. The special equipment orders for the U.S. dollar and the subprojects such as the purification of flue gas and the delivery of alumina were handed over to the Chinese general contractor. Taking this as a starting point, the Indian market has opened its doors to Chinalco.

Word of mouth and reputation bring greater gains. In the following four years, Chinalco successfully entered the markets of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America, which have the most potential for aluminum industry development. Only one technology export earned hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, becoming a bilateral trade between China and the host country of the project. important parts of.