Could this be the same coal-fired aluminium industry that Rio Tinto has been wanting to get rid of for a decade because it consistently loses money?
Aluminium smelting just doesn't really work as an export industry. Australia held onto it for a while because our main customer is Japan, whose energy costs are very high, and energy costs are almost everything in smelting.
Then the Gulf states built a series of massive gas-powered smelters and China had spare export capacity and the reason for keeping Australia's ageing smelters going vanished.
Australia is the world's third-biggest energy exporter, and energy exporters have to make a straightforward bargain to maximize foreign income: Export as much energy as possible, or requisition some at home for higher-value-added industrial exports.
The thing is, our comparative advantage is in commodity energy (coal, LNG, perhaps electricity & hydrogen in future) so the industrial path doesn't work very well in the long term. As we're seeing.
Especially because while in theory you can requisition lower-cost coal or gas for domestic industry, in practice resource extraction costs gradually converge towards the market price, so once contracts roll over industrial energy costs become unviable.
You're paying similar costs to fuel relatively small Australian smelters as Asian and Middle Eastern producers are paying to fuel vast smelters with enormous economies of scale we lack.
This is why Australia barely has a steelmaking industry any more, despite being the biggest iron ore and coking coal exporter! We just don't have the scale or the proximity to a major consumption market of metal-using industries.
One telling fact is that *even Sanjeev Gupta*, who has made a career out of buying struggling metal businesses off Rio and others, doesn't appear to have had a crack at Pacific Aluminium.
And as others have pointed out, once the car industry shut down (with Matt Canavan's full acquiescence), one of the biggest domestic customers for aluminium products -- especially the high-value-add, specialized products where metal producers make their money -- vanished.
