RUSAL to Lighten Queensland

RUSAL has announced the plans to construct a power plant in Australian Queensland. It will feed an aluminum mill, which RUSAL will build there, and sell some portion of generated power on the local market. The final parameters of the project are yet to be specified by the work group of RUSAL and Queensland. The analysts say the project will cost around $4.5 billion to RUSAL, i.e. more than half of $8 billion, which the aluminum giant of Russia is willing to invest by 2013.

The capacity of RUSAL’s future mill hasn’t been disclosed so far. But it is known for sure that it will be operating on the raw provided by aluminous facility of Queensland Aluminium Ltd (QAL). RUSAL acquired 20 percent in that company early this year and may annually count on 770,000 tons of alumina, or around 360,000 tons of aluminum. Therefore, the capacity of the new mill could be at least 360,000 tons.

Representatives of the company refused to forecast the worth of a new power plant, but specified it would work on coal or gas. Constructing a plant could cost $3 billion, said Aton analyst Dmitry Skryabin, but RUSAL will be able to sell excess power on the market. “I don’t think there will be more than 20 percent of unused power,” Skryabin specified. “But the prices for electric power in Australia are at least three-fold higher than in Russia.”

The analysts estimate the cost of the aluminum mill at $1.5 billion.

In RUSAL, they said they would finance the project for their own account, relying either on their own funds or on the borrowed money and without attracting any third party.

by www.kommersant.com