When will Alcoa clean up in Kwinana?

When Alcoa’s alumina refinery in Kwinana ships its last cargo this year it will leave a 61-year legacy of jobs, industrial development, a vital material produced and, unfortunately, an enormous mess to clean up.

That mess includes a vast contaminated plant leaching hazardous chemicals into the ocean and further inland nine piles of toxic residue, one 77 metres high.

Alcoa’s Kwinana refinery occupies prime waterfront industrial land near Perth.Credit: Nearmap

Few products leave a larger environmental footprint than the ingredient to make aluminium.

The bauxite containing alumina is normally found in shallow layers on the surface, so the area disturbed is far greater for a given amount of ore compared to the large open pit mines common in WA.

After alumina is extracted from bauxite using caustic soda, left over is environmentally hazardous red mud waste.

The bauxite from WA’s jarrah forest is “the lowest grade ore mined on a commercial scale anywhere in the world,” according to the Australian Aluminium Council, meaning more forest clearing and more toxic red mud for each tonne of alumina.

So far, Alcoa has cleared 280 square kilometre of jarrah forest to feed its three alumina refineries.

The Kwinana refinery alone has produced 138 million cubic metres of red mud stored in nine vast piles four kilometres inland, one 77 metres high, according to Alcoa’s tailings database.

The refinery, on the shore of Cockburn Sound, was classified as a contaminated site in 2023.

In 2014, the groundwater under the refinery was found to have concentrations of various metals and arsenic that “exceeded the trigger values for the protection of marine ecosystems” according to the public record of the site on WA’s contaminated sites database.

Unfortunately, Alcoa’s routine reporting on groundwater required under its license “contains insufficient information” to allow the regulator to properly assess the site.

Above ground the plant has issues as well.

Alcoa and a contractor were fined after two workers were exposed to asbestos in 2018. They were not told that coating on steel columns contained the cancer-causing substance.

The refinery was built 40 years before the use of asbestos was banned in WA.

Safely dismantling the refinery will be a hugely expensive exercise given the state’s regulations on working with the dangerous fibre are equal to the best in the world.

Alcoa will continue to use the Kwinana site to export alumina from its Pinjarra refinery and to import caustic soda, but most of the prime waterfront industrial land will stand idle.

At the same time, there are no more large areas of land left in Kwinana for new heavy industry, such as more battery chemical plants, that could provide new jobs to replace those lost at Alcoa.

For those opportunities not to be lost to other investment destinations Alcoa has to first spend a lot of money cleaning up its Kwinana site.

Lessons from oil and gas

If the WA government wants to understand the standard resources company response to fixing up its mess it could look at Australia’s offshore oil and gas players.

The sector that has a $57 billon decommissioning bill over coming decades had three principal approaches to tackle the problem: delay, delay, and then delay some more.

Woodside tried something different in 2016 and sold a decrepit oil production vessel the Northern Endeavour to an inexperienced underfunded one-man company that went into liquidation in 2020.

With taxpayers liable for a clean-up cost that could top $1billion the then Coalition government launched a two-pronged response: levy the industry to pay the bill and empower its offshore environment regulator to dismiss the excuses for delay and mandate timelines for the work.

Four years after responsibility for the Northern Endeavour fell to the Commonwealth, the industry’s approach has transformed and companies are set to remove an enormous amount of equipment from Australian waters this decade.

The lesson for WA is clear: mandate it, and it will happen; otherwise nothing.

The renegotiation of Alcoa’s outdated state agreements this year is the perfect opportunity to make it happen.

Curtailed or curtains?

But no clean up is required now because Alcoa has not closed down its Kwinana refinery, it has “curtailed” it?

“It is an important point, this is a curtailment decision, not a closure decision,” Alcoa chief operations officer Matt Reed said.

“We’ll continue to monitor the conditions that have led to this decision and if they change, we may well make a different decision.”

The state government must decide if restarting an ageing inefficient plant when its experienced workforce has gone, the equipment is even older, gas more expensive and environmental restrictions on bauxite mining stricter, is realistic, or a ruse to delay a huge expense.

Not only does the state need the land freed up to create new jobs, it also has to start managing the inevitable decline of alumina production in WA over coming decades that started this week. Mining never lasts forever.

While Alcoa looms large in the minds of people in WA it is not a big company. If it was listed in Australia it would rank 64th by value - the same as almost unknown Atlas Arteria that owns five overseas toll roads.

Alumina Limited, Alcoa’s Melbourne-based 40 per cent joint venture partner, does not make the list of Australia’s top 100 companies.

Together, they will have to spend enormous amounts in WA to restore the jarrah forest, make mountains of red mud safer and clean up refinery sites.

A wise government would ensure as much as possible is done while they are still operating in WA - giving the companies the cash to do the work and the government the negotiation leverage to ensure it is done.

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