Atlantic Alumina, also called Atalco, became the last U.S. refinery of its kind after another one 20 miles away closed in 2020. On the banks of the Mississippi River halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Atalco’s 550 workers crush, wash and heat Jamaican-mined bauxite in a series of solutions. What starts as a rust-colored rock comes out as powdery white aluminum oxide, a compound known as alumina that resembles sugar but whose granules are hard enough to scratch glass.
The product is sold to smelters to make “primary” aluminum, the raw material that manufacturers turn into everything from beer cans to plumbing parts. The Atalco plant says it single-handedly supplies about 40% of the alumina used in the United States.
“It’s been a very difficult operation,” said Mark Hansen, the CEO of Concord Resources, which became Atlantic Aluminum’s majority owner in 2021. The complex, first commissioned in 1957, has been pummeled recently by hurricanes and inflation, but Hansen said it’s important to keep the site running for national security.“If our company closed, we would be the only point of failure for that entire industry in the United States,” he said, noting that the sector has seen “a dramatic decline” in the last two decades.
Trump’s 25% tariffs on foreign-made aluminum, which took effect for most countries March 12 alongside comparable duties on steel, aim to reverse that. The sweeping levies he unveiled Wednesday on virtually all imports could prove a mixed bag, spurring demand for domestic wares while raising many producers’ costs.
Still, tariffs could buoy at least some parts of the domestic aluminum industry, analysts say: By making international supplies pricier, the American-made metal should become more competitive for buyers, at least in the short term.
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