MOSCOW, Russia, Thursday February 17, 2011 – UC Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium producer, has decided to restart the operations at the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant in Jamaica from July.
The company said the investment cost of the resumption of operations is expected to be approximately US$9.5 million while the plant commissioning budget is approximately US$17.5 million.
Energy and Mining Minister James Robertson said that about 1,000 jobs, many of them medium and high end, will come on stream in the areas of engineering, mining, hauling and management as a result of UC Rusal’s move.
“The multiplier effect to the people of Manchester and surrounding parishes is even more significant,” he told Parliament.
The total capacity of the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant is approximately 600 thousand tonnes of alumina per year. In 2011, the production of the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant is planned to be approximately 252 thousand tonnes of alumina.
Production at the plant was suspended in April 2009 due to cost-cutting measure.
UC Rusal said that since then, it undertook a number of measures “to ensure that when market conditions were such that they would make the restart of the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant economically viable, the operations would be restored in more effective and competitive manner”.
“The Company has carefully reviewed ways of optimizing the facility’s structure and production process, reducing cash operating costs and improving the efficiency of the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant’s operations. It is expected that the restart of the Windalco-Kirkvine Works Plant will increase the efficiency of the infrastructure in Windalco (including port and railway) which is only partially utilized for the Ewarton Works Plant at present,” UC Rusal said in a statement on its website.
Windalco (West Indies Alumina Company) comprises two alumina refineries – Ewarton Works and Kirkvine Works –, a shipping port, Port Esquivel, and also bauxite mines in Schwallenburgh (Ewarton) and Russell Place (Kirkvine) and farms in Manchester and St. Ann. The production capacity of the company is 1.2 million tonnes of alumina annually.
