The Icelandic EIC-beneficiary DTE has signed a $1.85 million contract with Nordural for provision of their real-time chemical composition analysis solution for the four skimming stations of the new low-carbon billet casthouse of Nordural.
DTE is an innovation-driven SME dedicated to the development of high technology equipment and systems for process and quality control in the aluminium industry. Their revolutionary solution can perform in-line real-time chemical analyses of molten aluminium and cryolite with optimum accuracy and repeatability. The company offers their system to aluminium producers that aim to improve their processes when it comes to efficiency, operating costs, worker safety and environmental impact.
The company established a cooperation contract with Nordural, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Century Aluminium Company in Iceland, that produces pure aluminum and aluminum alloys in an environmentally conscious manner. Using DTE’s technology, Nordural will benefit from maximising throughput, minimising cycle time in the furnaces, also minimising emissions and energy consumption, and removing bottleneck limitations in the casthouse. Furthermore, DTE’s fully autonomous solution avoids the need for manual intervention by plant personnel, contributing to plant safety and reducing analysis costs.
About the signature of this new contract, Diego Areces, CEO of DTE, said, “I’m very thankful and excited for this opportunity, which is a major milestone for DTE. Nordural has been one of our strategic partners and has remained a great supporter of DTE. We look forward to delivering on this commitment and contributing value to the new low-carbon billet casthouse project. In addition, we will continue working together, deploying DTE’s solution along Nordural’s production process to maximise operational efficiency, resilience, and sustainability.”
With this new value-added casthouse, employing DTE’s solution, Nordural will have a capacity of 150,000 tonnes of billet production and is expected to start production in the first quarter of 2024. This expansion project entailed a $120 million investment and is expected to create approximately 90 jobs during construction and approximately 40 permanently.
One of DTE’s values is to contribute for sustainability promotion in the metal production industry, which perfectly matches with Nordural’s new Natur-Al™ billets and foundry products that will be produced to meet the growing demand from European customers for low-carbon aluminium goods.
DTE received a full blended grant from the European Innovation Council to promote the industrialisation and commercialisation of their next generation solution for process analytical instrumentation in the aluminium industry.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.