It certainly points to the reality that energy costs are a major burden for many companies.
Smelted aluminum is expensive in terms of electricity used to melt it and form it.
Its one reason why the most successful recycling program is for aluminum - it is frozen electricity.
Will it reopen?
Not with current baseline electrical costs.
It will reopen when the US and Canada supply of AL ingots gets low, causing the wholesale prices to rise, it currently is at a 3 year low. The miners and refiners turn on and off very quickly, they are very dependant on D. and Electrical costs.
For aircraft grade AL, Ti, Magnesium, Colbalt , the supply is nearly closed loop, despite all the press, reclaimed aircraft scraps are used to make new aircraft. Regans 500 ship navy is the source of a good amount of the scrap for current US shipyards. There are piles and piles of ingots ready for the DOD to order to ship yards and aircraft plants if a bigger than the gulf wars effort ever emerges.
The consumption of AL cans is 80 times larger than it is for AL auto and truck parts. We have about 5 years of AL can backlog for the reprocessors to get through.
Someone posted in another thread that AL foil in grociery stores had doubled, while the spot price of the grade of AL in foil has dropped $2900/ton to $2600/ton since Jan 1 2022. The news and the daily sales seems to drive prices more than raw costs anymore. There is more cost in the box and moving the contained box than the contents.
For this plants workers, it is not unexpected. There is an abundance of skilled positions in the region that they can fill assuming alien worker are exported back to lands they come from.
The mini mills, the electric arc powered ones, have been running only late night shifts this summer unless they are on a grid with stable excess baselines...The mills in OH, MI, IN, IL, MO seem to all be still going full bore. The clasical mills powered by coal are verticaly intergrated and are playing the game over decades. They also have piles and piles of Iron and Steel products to ship as soon as someone can get the ship or truck into the loading dock.
Not with current baseline electrical costs.
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The problem is that the plant thought they could make more money by buying electricity on the wholesale market... that decision was made in 2014 and so far it has worked out fine for them, until this past year.
The article was posted yesterday... see this links for the comments about this.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4073271/posts
They should just use electricity - that would solve the problem. < / s >