Inner Mongolia to suspend new ferro-alloy, Al projects link

Published date: 04 March 2021

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China's Inner Mongolia province will suspend the approval of new production projects for ferro-alloys, aluminium, alumina and polysilicon in the country's 14th five-year plan during 2021-25.

The move is in line with the northern autonomous region's targets of controlling energy consumption.

The local government will not approve new projects for all the materials mentioned above, which are considered to be energy sensitive and polluting, unless the developer finds a replacement for the capacity and energy consumption.

Inner Mongolia also aims to enforce low-efficient ferro-alloy capacity, with furnaces below 25,000 kilovolt-ampere (kVA), to be phased out by the end of 2022. The materials exclude low and medium carbon ferro-chrome, low and medium carbon ferro-manganese, low-titanium ferro-chrome, silicon-calcium-barium-aluminium alloy, rare earth alloy, silicon-zirconium, silicon-barium-manganese-zirconium and specialty ferro-alloys containing tungsten and vanadium.

Inner Mongolia is one of the main production hubs of ferro-alloys in China, with around 6mn t/yr of capacity for silico-manganese, over 1mn t/yr for ferro-silicon and nearly 4mn t/yr for ferro-chrome.

Many ferro-chrome producers in the major production hub of Ulanqab city in Inner Mongolia will cut more output in March because of electricity supply shortages. The local government is set to reduce its electricity consumption for high energy consumption industries, including ferroalloy, calcium carbide and graphite, to 2.9bn kilowatt-hour (kWh) for March, compared with Yn3.5bn kWh in February and 3.8bn kWh in January, to meet the goal of restricting its average electricity consumption to less than 3.8bn kWh in the first quarter.





capacity projected to fall