Oklahoma Primary Aluminum Smelter — Tulsa Port of Inola

No one has built a new primary aluminum smelter in the United States since 1980. That gap ends at Inola, a prairie town of about two thousand people east of Tulsa, where Emirates Global Aluminium and Century Aluminum have formed a 60-40 joint venture to spend roughly $4 billion on a plant rated at 750,000 tonnes a year.

Project Scope

The site is the Tulsa Port of Inola, on the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System. That matters more than it sounds: alumina comes in and metal goes out, and barge access to the Mississippi system is what makes the freight math work at this volume. Rated capacity of 750,000 tonnes would more than double current U.S. primary aluminum output on its own. The joint venture expects about 1,000 permanent direct jobs and roughly 4,000 construction jobs at peak. Construction is targeted to start at the end of 2026, with first metal by the end of the decade. The Oklahoma Department of Commerce and the state’s FISTA incentive framework are backing the project, and aluminum’s designation as a critical material for defense and vehicle electrification supply chains is the policy rationale sitting underneath it.

Why It Matters

The binding constraint on U.S. smelting has never been capital or engineering. It’s power. A 750,000-tonne smelter draws on the order of a gigawatt of firm, cheap electricity, continuously, for decades, and it cannot be curtailed without destroying the pots. That single requirement is why American smelters closed through the 2000s and why site selection here took years. Oklahoma’s generation mix and wholesale prices are the actual reason Inola won, not the incentives. For contractors, the scope is a specific and unusual one: potlines, rectifier substations, carbon anode facilities and cast houses, built to metallurgical tolerances, on a site that also needs river terminal work. There is very little live U.S. experience with any of it, because the last people who built one are retired. Expect the joint venture to import a lot of technical direction from EGA’s Emirati operations and to lean hard on domestic heavy industrial contractors for execution. Watch the power agreement before you watch the groundbreaking.

Project Team & Details