"... if rising carbon prices drive a low-cost, emissions-free electricity supply sector in Australia."
I can see how carbon pricing can stimulate low emission electricity generation, but I can't see how that would translate to 'low-cost'. Further, even if we did pursue vigorous carbon pricing to stimulate low emission energy and costs do come down over the 'long term', some of the remaining four smelters might still fold in the mean time. I am not bagging carbon pricing, I think it is necessary for many reasons, but I don't see how its going to save our aluminium industry.

All very convincing and cogent. Alcoa has seen the writing on the wall, and is building a new vastly more efficient refinery in Iceland, where both labor and carbon free electricity is cheaper.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the corporate tax rate was less than half ours?
Iceland must ship every ounce of bauxite!
It would be more profitable to ship finished Aluminium!
We who own much of the raw materials, could compete, if we but had cheaper than coal, carbon free thorium power, which is more reliable than a billion dollar Icelandic hydro-power scheme that is exclusively reliant on glacier melt water!
Ideally, we would build a purpose built thorium power station right alongside any smelter, which would eliminate transmission line losses and costs!
As a govt owned facility, this power could be supplied at virtual costs, to further sweeten the pie! (Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago.)
However, its London to a brick, our less than visionary Pollies, will stay locked onto the incoherent Ideologies, that force them to remain permanently impotent, while more enlightened, smaller, vastly less well resourced, much poorer Countries, surge past us!

An inland shipping canal, that dramatically shortened ship turnaround times, a very rapid Double Decker rail system, and our own fleet of nuclear powered, roll on roll off submersible ferries, would change all that.
Trains would only ever have to be loaded and unloaded just once, massively reducing all handling costs!
Add a completely harmonized vastly simplified trade practices act, a single stand alone unavoidable expenditure tax, which eliminates things like payroll tax, land tax, fuel excise and the ubiquitous cascading GST, and suddenly, all the business economic parameters, make us a much more attractive destination for energy dependent industries, than Iceland etc!
When will our patently useless self serving pollies, take off their ideological blinkers, stop muttering simpleminded moronic mantras, particularly, that the govt has no business in business, and allow us to compete, (not before time,) with tiny principalities like Iceland, Norway, Singapore and Ireland.
Rhrosty.

Interesting article, but...

Looks like Australia's aluminium industry needs to be heavily subsidised to survive. The main subsidy going to electrical power from high polluting sources.

The implication at the end of the article that nuclear power would save our aluminium industry neglects the brick wall of low world aluminium prices which may close down our aluminium industry anyway.

There seems to be an inbuilt assumption that an Australian nuclear power industry can only be created by government intervention including carbon pricing market manipulation. Such a nuclear industry is on top of the Wish List for engineers but are real nuclear costs too high?

The 800lb gorilla unmentioned in this article is the cost of Australian labour in making Australian aluminium.

Are Australian labour costs, set at the peak of the mining-energy boom, excessive now that the boom is over?

Should Australia therefore reduce or freeze mining-energy-aluminium wages to adjust to lower international growth?

Pete

Rhrosty - The nuclear and armaments industries do not want thorium reactors, can't make an atom bomb from that also it is much safer than what is used now so other industries will not get in for there share of the money.

It is like cure for cancer that can't be patented by a company if big business can't get an extremely large profit from something it won't happen at this stage in time.

Too bad this world is controlled by money only.

Phillip, There was a time when much more pragmatic govts built things, owned by we the people.
When we were a nation that did just that, we were the third wealthiest, and a creditor nation to boot.
We built the Snowy mountains scheme, only because the govt, virtually any government, can borrow for around half that of private industry! Even so, those servicing costs must be met from revenue, private or govt. The only diff, we pay twice as much in debt servicing cost, where private players, run the show, and all to often, I believe, price gouge?
We should build several cheaper than coal thorium reactors, namely because there's no weapons spin off, and no over excited neighbors.
We have tons of the stuff and could likely meet world demand, for around 700 years?
Read the article, thorium, cheaper than coal, for more compelling reasons for preferring it.
And indeed, it offers the only real, available to us solution, to global competition.
Whatever we ship, bauxite for foreign processors, or finished aluminium, the shipping costs are a virtual constant!
Our own wages numbers, as a factor, are only 16% of production! The carbon costs and offsets earn Alcoa, a handsome profit, so the price of carbon, in this instance was simply not a viable factor! And it doesn't help to find cogent doable solutions, to pretend that it does!
Labor costs are not what is killing our homegrown industries, nor is a price on carbon, except were price gouging power companies make it so!
The real costs that prevent or cruel business in Australia, are energy, water and transport, all of which, could be transformed, to the benefit of all Australians; if only we could install a visionary govt.
The only trouble is, where in this country, can one find so much as a single visionary leader, willing to front up and shirt front the huge vested interest, or as thick as a brick or ideological opposition, (same thing) to change and or, real reform!
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Strange that everyone is surprised that the aluminium industry is departing our shores. That was the stated intention of the carbon tax and certainly the heartfelt desire of The Greens and Labor's left. They never actually said so in a direct way, but their aim was to drive such industries out of Australia in order to somehow save the world from warming a couple of thousandths of a degree in a century's time. So good Labor unionists are out of work (with more to come) directly as a result of Labor's policies in government.

Great result lefties! Keep it up and we'll all be back in the dark ages before we know it.