By Joe Quinn, Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Industrial Materials, SAFE
The recent announcement that Century Aluminum and Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA) are partnering to build a massive primary aluminum smelter near Tulsa, Oklahoma, is welcome and long overdue.
If built, this facility would roughly double U.S. primary aluminum capacity to 1.5 million metric tons within eight years, a remarkable feat for an industry that has seen net capacity decline for decades.
But before anyone declares victory, policymakers and industry alike must confront the real bottleneck: the nation’s power system.
Century and EGA explicitly tie the project’s viability to securing a long-term, competitively priced power purchase agreement with Public Service Company of Oklahoma and a reliable power supply with the state. As encouraging as that progress may be, no PPA is yet signed. In an industry where electricity accounts for a major share of operating cost and facilities run continuously for decades, that’s the milestone that matters.
This strain between industrial ambition and energy reality is not anecdotal; it’s structural. The SAFE Center for Grid Security’s “Powering Prosperity: Transmission & America’s Industrial Golden Age” report lays it out starkly: surviving and thriving in heavy industries like aluminum smelting requires an affordable, reliable energy system capable of meeting large-scale, 24-hour demand. But the U.S. grid was not built for that purpose, nor is the current strategy prioritized to support grid-intensive manufacturing alongside emerging power demands like AI data centers.
Our analysis shows the United States lags China in domestic capacity for aluminum, semiconductor fabrication, and other foundational industries in part because access to affordable power remains uneven and constrained. We call for expanding high-voltage and interregional transmission lines and for a National Reindustrialization Action Plan that elevates industrial energy needs to the same policy priority as the AI sector.
This resonates for U.S. smelting. Federal incentives help, but they stop short of solving the fundamental grid issues. Capital is ready; power is not.
This is a national security concern. Aluminum is essential to defense systems, transportation, energy infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing. As our report emphasizes, maintaining and expanding strategic manufacturing capacity is necessary not just for competitiveness, but for defense readiness.
Yet today’s primary aluminum production covers only about 15 percent of U.S. demand. With this new smelter alone, domestic output could climb to roughly 25 percent by the early 2030s. Progress, yes, but still far shy of the 5–6 million metric tons of projected demand.
And scale matters here: a stand-alone 750,000-ton facility will consume more than 10 terawatt-hours per year. Without major transmission and generation upgrades, any smelter will face high costs that erode competitiveness compared to global peers, especially China.
Absent policy shifts, U.S. industry will continue to be stuck between capital and ambition on one side and infrastructure limitations on the other. This is not theoretical: data centers and AI firms already compete aggressively for grid access, often outbidding traditional manufacturing sectors with thinner margins for the same power contracts. The SAFE analysis warns that without strategic planning, new power demand could be consumed by few sectors, leaving others, like aluminum, starved.
Policy prescriptions are not luxuries. They are necessities if America is to build not just one successful smelter, but a resilient, diversified manufacturing base. If the Century–EGA project succeeds, it will be a positive step. But industrial strategy without energy infrastructure is like building a factory without a foundation. Concrete benefits will come only when policymakers address the grid constraints, transmission bottlenecks, and regulatory inertia that still stand between announcement and execution.
For America to compete globally, it must power both its advanced technologies and its strategic manufacturing sectors. The Century–EGA announcement is not the end of the road. It’s a reminder of how far policy must go to make the next wave of American industrial resurgence a reality.
Twitter
