Heavy Industry
emissions since 2019
emissions intensity since 2019
Some projects advance amid market challenges
Heavy Industry Climate Action Index | 2019 = base year
CASE STUDY
The quest for lower-carbon phones
The Challenge
Apple was facing a formidable aluminum emissions challenge. The lightweight metal, which forms the protective chassis of iPhones and other devices, accounted for over a quarter of its manufacturing carbon footprint in 2015.73 Apple engineers went on the hunt, meeting some of the biggest aluminum companies, independent labs and startups around the world, to crack the emissions challenge. They finally found a promising solution at Alcoa Corp., which was experimenting with a new aluminum smelting process.
The smartphone maker quickly brought Rio Tinto into the fold. The opportunity immediately posed an interesting challenge for the two aluminum rivals: go it alone or pursue a high-risk, high-reward research & development joint venture?
The Idea
Pursuing the latter, Alcoa and Rio Tinto pooled their R&D resources to create Elysis, based first at an Alcoa facility in Pittsburgh in 2019 and then at Rio Tinto’s Complex Jonquiere in Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec. Hydro Quebec’s low-emissions hydro-powered grid also helped reduce its overall carbon footprint.74
Together with support from the federal and Quebec governments, Elysis had $650 million in fire power to set about changing a 130-year-old smelter process (pioneered by Alcoa founder Charles Hall back in 1886); a deeply efficient process, but one that had earned aluminum the reputation of being hard-to-abate.
The typical aluminum smelter uses electricity to split alumina (refined from bauxite) into pure aluminum and oxygen. Here’s where the emissions come in: the oxygen reacts with carbon anodes, releasing CO2. That's where Elysis entered the fray.75
The joint venture team “failed fast,” triaging the opportunity to learn and retest quickly. Soon, it had struck on a possible breakthrough: proprietary “inert anodes” that emit pure oxygen as a byproduct, rather than carbon.
“It looks simple—just swap an anode—but in reality it required a full redesign of the smelter. What we built now looks more like a battery than a traditional aluminum potline,” said Francois Perras, CEO of Elysis.
Perras credits the unlock to the two global competitors, Rio Tinto and Alcoa, coming together as no single company could solve the challenge alone, with a key end-user, Apple, involved in the process.
While several veterans from Alcoa and Rio Tinto were drawn to the Elysis experiment, the facility also became a cluster for young talent that’s now become a 200-strong workforce.
The process, Elysis believes, will also generate significant economic gains: operating costs are expected to fall 15% as the anodes last more than 30 times longer than traditional carbon-based anodes. The technology is also retrofittable to existing smelters once commercially scaled.
Apple, which purchased the first-ever commercial batch of aluminum resulting from the joint venture, for the production of the 16-inch MacBook Pro, has already pursued several other policies to whittle down the supply chain emissions attributable to aluminum used in Apple products from 27% to 7% of its total manufacturing footprint.76
The Obstacles
- Commercialization and embedding the new technology in Rio Tinto and Alcoa’s existing and new aluminum smelter plants.
- In 2024, Elysis issued its first smelter technology licence to Rio Tinto for a demonstration plant with 10 pots to be built at Rio’s Quebec plant.77 An even bigger scaling challenge is industrial prototype cells at the end of an existing potline at Rio Tinto's Alma smelter. It’s seen as the litmus test whether the anode’s integrity, the metal’s purity and cost benefits remain intact.
- Like any early-stage technology, the impact of Elysis’ solution will depend on whether it can be scaled and commercialized. Also, while the technology is designed to lower process emissions from aluminum production, it does not address emissions from the electrical grid in which it operates, which could include coal or natural gas depending on where the grid is located.
The Insight
Pooling resources is a promising model in heavy industry with chemicals giants BASF SE, SABIC and Linde Plc78 teaming up to build an electrifying steam cracker for a demonstration chemical plant in Germany, and Dow Inc. and Shell Plc79 developing electrically-heated steam cracker furnaces at a facility in the Netherlands.
Another major lesson: a technology in a sandbox can ultimately spawn a new supply chain that could lower emissions across the wider industry.
Emissions intensity estimates are defined as emissions (tonnes CO2 equivalent) per square meter of floor space. Floor space data for residential and commercial buildings was sourced from Natural Resources Canada’s Com-prehensive Energy Use Database. For years where NRCan estimates were unavailable, floor space was projected using a simple linear trend informed by recent historical growth, providing an indicative estimate aligned with current patterns in building activity. Emissions intensities were calculated separately for the residential and commercial sectors and rolled up into a single measure using a weighted average determined by floor space.
The emissions decline resulting from decreased coal-powered electricity generation is taken from historical emissions factors and implied coal-based generation as reported under Table A13-1 as part of Statistical Annex 13 Electricity Intensity.
The emissions impact from the estimated increase in natural gas powered generation is based on historical conversion factors from 2019-2023 reported data under Table A13-1 as part of Statistical Annex 13 Electricity Intensity.
Total sector emissions within electricity in 2025 are the summation of the estimated decline in emissions from coal-powered electricity generation and the increase in natural gas-powered electricity generation as detailed above. These values are then compared relative to 2005 and 2019 as disclosed under Table A13-1 as part of Statistical Annex 13 Electricity Intensity.
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What Elysis has built looks more like a battery than a traditional aluminum potline