UAE’s Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) loaned ten Emirati engineers to Saudi Arabia in order to gain experience the firm needs as it prepares to launch the Al Taweelah refinery next year.
These ten engineers are the first of over two dozen to be sent to the Ma’aden alumina refinery this year. Ma’aden is the only other alumina refinery in the region.
The engineers are scheduled to stay on site for five months in areas such as production, maintenance, process engineering, and the refinery’s laboratory. They will then return to the UAE and contribute their experience to the building and launch of the US$3 billion alumina refinery.
The refinery is the first to be built in the UAE and is the country’s largest aluminium project at the present time. It will directly employ approximately 600 people, including a plant supervisory force of at least 25% Emiratis.
“EGA has developed deep local engineering experience in aluminium smelting since the 1970s,” explained EGA’s Senior Vice President of Al Taweelah alumina refinery Zaher Ghanem. “At the Al Taweelah alumina refinery we need to develop that local experience from scratch, and we are grateful to our friends at Ma’aden for their support.”
Once operational, the Al Taweelah refinery is expected to significantly reduce the country’s reliance upon imported alumina. The refinery’s planned capacity of two million metric tons will provide three quarters of the country’s alumina consumption, and forty percent of EGA’s alumina needs. It is also expected to contribute up to one quarter of a billion US dollars per year to the country’s gross domestic product.
Based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, EGA is an aluminium conglomerate created by the merger between Dubai Aluminium and Emirates Aluminium in 2013. EGA holds interests in bauxite/alumina and primary aluminium smelting. It has a yearly production of aluminium of 2.4 million metric tons, making it one of the five largest primary aluminium producers in the world.