A Report From Energy Ant - My Trips to BP Cooper River and Alcoa Aluminum!

On a hot summer day in July, I got on a bus with a group of super teachers. We were headed on a field trip to the BP chemical and Alcoa Aluminum sites in South Carolina. By taking a bus, we were helping to conserve fuel. They even let me drive!

Our first stop was BP Cooper River manufacturing plant. You may recognize BP as one of your local gas stations, but the company does much more than sell gasoline! Besides research in renewable energy sources (like solar), they do a lot of work with chemicals. In fact, we were visiting a chemical manufacturing site today. The plant is the largest PTA—purified terephthalic acid—unit in the WORLD! What is purified terephthalic acid? PTA is a white powder that can be used to make soda pop bottles, audio and video recording tapes, photographic film, and even clothing!

We began our tour in a meeting room where we learned all about PTA. After our briefing, we got back on the bus and drove around the 5,000-acre site. The grounds contain not one but two manufacturing units! Together, they produce 2.8 BILLION pounds of PTA a year! We also saw shipping, utility, storage, and waste treatment facilities. There was even a stop to meet the scientists that test the PTA with chemicals to make sure the PTA leaving the plant is top quality.

One of the cool things about the site is that one-third of the property is wetlands. The Cooper River Corridor Project started in 1989 and is home to the largest bald eagle nesting area in the state, thousands of acres of wetlands and pine forests, and three national historic landmarks. The area also has a nature center that school and community groups can come and visit to learn about the natural environment.

After lunch, we headed for Alcoa Aluminum. At the plant, they make the aluminum that is used for soda pop cans, bicycle and car frames, aluminum foil, airplanes, electrical wire, buildings, and much, much more! Aluminum is an important metal that is widely used because it is lightweight, recyclable, conducts electricity and heat, non-magnetic, highly workable, and even naturally good looking. Safety is very important at Alcoa. Since we would be leaving our bus to go see the machinery up close, we had to wear really cool goggles, hard hats, and flame resistant jackets!

“It all starts with dirt,” our tour guide told us. The dirt used to make aluminum is called bauxite ore. The bauxite is mixed with lime and caustic soda and is heated. (Things that are caustic are capable of burning, corroding, dissolving, or eating away by chemical action.) The soda causes the wanted aluminum oxide to separate from the rest of the dirt, and the heat removes unwanted water by turning it to steam. After some cleaning, a white powder called alumina is left. It looks a lot like sugar. This process is called refining.

The next step is smelting—that’s how the white alumina turns into the aluminum we use. First, they dissolve the powdered alumina in a cryolite bath inside large carbon-lined pots. Next, they send a powerful electrical current through the bath, and the aluminum metal separates from the chemicals. A side effect of this process is a magnetic field around the machines. Our guide gave us paper clips to play with—they danced in out hands and stood straight up when placed on the ground!

The aluminum is then mixed with other metals in the furnace. When two metals (or a metal and a chemical) are mixed together, it is called an alloy. By creating alloys, you changed the properties of the aluminum. (Think about how aluminum foil is different from the aluminum used for cars.) The metal was poured into different molds. This was one of the best parts of the tour because we could see the red-hot metal being poured, and we were surrounded by giant beams, tubes, and sheets of aluminum!

One of the best things about aluminum is that it is recyclable. Not only does this lower the amount of garbage in landfills, but it also saves money and energy. Recycling uses 95% less energy than making new metal from ore. Cars that use aluminum are lighter, so they burn less fuel and create less pollution. Two-thirds of the beverage cans used in the U.S. are returned for recycling, and 85-90% of the aluminum in cars is recycled.

My trip to the BP Chemical and Alcoa Aluminum were a lot of fun! It was really neat to see how things I use every day are made from the earth’s natural resources.