Alcan Fort William Scotland

The back ground to aluminum manufacturing in Fort William and Kinlochleven
The Railway stumbled on Fort William in 1890 and also as in most other places worldwide it lured people. In 1929 The British Aluminium business Ltd finished their particular major hydro building programme of dams and pipework to carry countless litres of liquid to their brand-new aluminum smelters at Fort William and Kinlochleven. Countless males came from throughout to get results and labour in the project among others became the very first employees regarding the business.

Earlier, in 1907, the Kinlochleven plant had been commissioned. The villages of Inverlochy and Kinlochleven were built especially to produce housing when it comes to workers and their families and Kinlochleven ended up being the first town in Scotland is supplied with electrical energy because of the hydro-generating section.

Rainfall for energy?
Loch Treig, which you are able to see through the western Highland Railway Line, north and east of Spean Bridge, may be the main supply of water. Liquid is taken from the loch along a 24Km long pipe, which is 4.5m in diameter. As you go along to Fort William additional water is gathered through the surrounding mountains and launched into the pipe. The familiar pipelines descending through the shoulder of Ben Nevis are the last part of the waterway. This creates an incredible volume and energy of liquid and gravity drives it into our DC producing turbines.

The Method
Alumina is taken to Fort William by train after becoming processed, from bauxite in Ireland. We use the electrical energy to work the 80 electrolytic cells in our two Cellrooms. The molten aluminium is siphoned through the cells at regular periods, transported to our Cast Shop, after that cast into big ingots which, whenever cooled, tend to be filled onto lorries or trains and sent for additional for processing into foil, vehicle parts and a lot of various other of use aluminium services and products.

Read our Alcan 2012 Sustainable developing Report (PDF)
What do we do?
We create around 40, 000 tonnes of aluminium annually, generally speaking cast in 10 tonne ingots We use around 174 individuals, particularly trained the various operations within the plant. We work the plant into the many demanding ecological, high quality and wellness & protection standards and hold registrations to ISO, ISO 9001:2000, OHSAS and EMAS. They're controlled within a completely Integrated control program. We generate more or less 85 Megawatts of electrical energy from Lochaber and Kinlochleven energy stations and certainly will sell excess on nationwide Grid