Hydro targets the first half of 2024 for full operation in Michigan

In mid-November, Norsk Hydro ASA held a ceremony to mark the opening of its Cassopolis, Michigan, plant. That site, which the Norwegian company invested $150 million in, will be able to produce 120,000 metric tons of recycled-content aluminum ingot annually. According to Hydro, the plant will produce aluminum with the "lowest carbon footprint in North America.”

Recycling Today spoke with Duncan Pitchford, head of strategy and business development at Hydro Aluminum Metal, to get more details about the Cassopolis plant, including its ramp-up plans.

“Our anticipation is that we will hit rated capacity in the first half of next year—end of Q1 [or] probably early Q2,” he says. “Obviously, that depends on successful, safe ramp-up of all of the equipment, but that is what we anticipate.”

Hydro Cassopolis will produce 6000 series extrusion ingot or billet, Pitchford says, and most of the postconsumer scrap feedstock the facility buys to produce its Circal product, which has a minimum recycled content of 75 percent, will be 6000 series. “But that’s not all we’ll buy,” he adds, noting that electrical conductor (EC) aluminum wire chops and other types of scrap will be used to produce the ingot.

Prioritizing scrap

The company will source that scrap from scrap processors, though he says he cannot give a particular radius that Hydro will buy within. “Scrap travels a certain distance economically, and beyond that distance, it becomes uneconomic,” Pitchford says. “If you look at where the plant is located, we are not too far from Chicago; we’re not too far from Detroit; we’re not too far from some of the larger industrial cities in northern Indiana and Ohio, so those areas would generally tend to be the areas where the scrap would come from.”

The company also recently announced a joint venture with Holland, Michigan-based recycling firm Padnos, Alusort LLC, designed to “industrialize Hydro’s proprietary sorting technology, HySort, bringing this advanced aluminum sorting technology to the United States.”

Through Alusort, a HySort sorting machine will be installed at Padnos’ existing facility in Grandville, Michigan, with production expected to start next year, according Hydro.

“With our state-of-the-art sorting technology, the joint venture can handle the most mixed and challenging scrap types that otherwise would have ended up in landfills,” Hydro President and CEO Hilde Merete Aasheim says in a news release announcing the joint venture.

Hydro Cassopolis also will accept some production scrap from its customers, Pitchford says.

The site has one line dedicated to Circal production that includes a delacquering melting furnace and a casting furnace and a second more traditional line that features a reverb melting furnace and casting furnace, he says.  

“The delacquering equipment allows us to take shredded postconsumer scrap,” Pitchford says. Hydro operates reverb furnaces at some of its other U.S. sites already, but this is its first site with a delacquering furnace.

“We can produce Circal in traditional reverb finance; we’ve done it at both Henderson and Commerce,” he says of Hydro’s sites in Kentucky and Texas. “To consume significant amounts of shredded scrap in a traditional reverb furnace is challenging. The delacquering furnace equipment that we have is specifically designed to utilize that type of material and is more efficient in doing so.”

Automotive among targeted markets

Hydro says it aims to supply Circal produced at Cassopolis to the automotive market, however, these manufacturers will need to perform PPAP (production part approval process) testing of Circal before ordering from Cassopolis.

“As we cast metal, we will feed that material into that testing process,” Pitchford says. “As soon as the tests can be completed, then we will start the deliveries. Every end customer does it slightly differently, and the customers that we will be supplying, many of them are existing customers that we supply from, say, our Henderson, Kentucky, plant today. Whereas maybe in a blank-slate PPAP process, it can take many months, because we already supply those customers, that process is abbreviated somewhat so that we can commence delivery relatively soon.”  

Pitchford says he anticipates that once the plant is running at full capacity next year, it will be supplying the automotive sector. “Maybe not all products, but some products for sure.”

In addition to automotive, he says Cassopolis will supply all the traditional aluminum extrusion sectors, including building and construction, other transportation, consumer durables and general industrial. Many of these sectors are feeling pressure from consumers related to the environmental impacts of their products.  

“When you talk about demand for low-carbon products, it is the end customer who is asking for this type of material,” Pitchford says. “They have made commitments toward their customers—you and I, the person on the street—that they need to meet. The person on the street is asking for this.”

Pitchford says children, ages 14 and 18, are examples. “They absolutely shudder when they see me using a disposable plastic water bottle,” he says. “The next generation of consumer wants to know where the material is coming from that is used in their products, and they want to see it produced in a responsible fashion.

“What we are trying to do in Cassopolis is meet that trend head-on with the delivery of products like Hydro Circal,” he adds.

Additional features of Hydro Cassopolis

The Cassopolis plant includes other forms of technology designed to reduce the company’s environmental footprint, improve billet quality and facilitate the traceability of its aluminum.

Cassopolis uses low-pressure casting, or LPC, technology developed by Hycast, Hydro’s cast house technology company. Pitchford says the benefits of LPC include being able to cast material that has more alloying elements, a thinner inverse segregation zone (which is caused by entrapped highly alloyed liquid aluminum in the central region of the strip being squeezed toward surface) that yields more usable metal and improved productivity.

He explains that some of the aluminum alloys used by the auto industry have additional trace elements to provide the needed properties. “As you add more trace elements to the material, it becomes more challenging to produce. LPC technology gives us more flexibility than gas cushion technology to be able to produce that type of material.”

The site also uses a new inline helical ultrasonic testing system for billet surface inspection, and all billets will be laser marked with a code that Pitchford describes as “sort of an advanced QR code” that provides customers with enhanced traceability for their material. Those codes can be read by adding a scanning device to a customer’s press that pulls the full production history for a billet into its production management software. He adds that this will be particularly useful to customers making structural automotive components.

Cassopolis also has a rail spur that will allow the site to take delivery of primary aluminum produced in Canada using hydrogen that it will blend with its scrap feedstock. “Of course, that reduces the carbon footprint associated with the transport of that material,” he says.

The site also uses electric forklifts and plans to source 100 percent renewable base electricity, Pitchford says.

“All of these steps add up to reduce the overall impact of the material that we will make.”