When a European start-up developed a breakthrough technology capable of transforming low-grade bauxite – once considered waste – into high-quality feedstock for aluminium production, they announced it at an industry conference in Miami, United States.
Six years on, an industrial complex based on the technology is up and running in China, just 10 months after construction began.
In Liulin, a coal-mining county in Shanxi province, the foreign technology conceived in France and Switzerland was rapidly engineered, permitted, constructed and commissioned inside a functioning industrial complex – the result of unprecedented coordination between a provincial government eager for transformation and a local energy industry determined to take the global lead.
The project, a partnership between French-Swiss firm IB2 and Shanxi Senze Energy Technology Group, marks the world’s first large-scale deployment of this revolutionary silica-removal technology.
