Aluminium Bahrain produced 1,623,139 tonnes in 2025, a company record and its second consecutive year without a lost-time injury. The capacity question behind it has changed shape: the Line 7 project has been reworked into a replacement of the 1971-vintage Lines 1, 2 and 3, with Bechtel running the feasibility study.
Aluminium Bahrain produced 1,623,139 tonnes of metal in 2025, a company record and narrowly ahead of the 1,622,261 tonnes it made in 2024, beating its own annual target despite a fire at the plant late in the year that took production offline.
The 878-tonne margin over the previous year is not the interesting number. What the result says is that a smelter running six potlines, three of which date from the early 1970s, is still creeping output upward against a nameplate capacity it passed some time ago. Line 6, commissioned in 2019, added roughly 540,000 tonnes a year and took Alba past 1.5 million tonnes of installed capacity; the 2025 figure reflects several years of incremental gains layered on top of that base.
Alba, which describes itself as the world's largest aluminium smelter on a single site, also closed the year with more than 42 million work hours without a lost-time injury, a second consecutive injury-free year and the first such run in five decades of operation. Ali Al Baqali, the company's chief executive, said the result “is more than a production figure; it reflects our ability to overcome adversity and set new benchmarks in both operational performance and safety”.
Behind the record sits a capacity decision that has quietly changed shape. For years Alba's growth plan was Line 7, a seventh potline in the pattern of Line 6. That is no longer what the company is studying. Alba now intends to replace Lines 1, 2 and 3, in service since 1971, with modern facilities on the existing site, and has appointed Bechtel to carry out the feasibility study. The replacement is expected to be similar in scale to Line 6, in the region of 540,000 tonnes a year.
The logic is straightforward and mostly about power. Aluminium smelting is an electricity business with a metallurgical process attached, and cell technology that is more than fifty years old consumes materially more power per tonne than current designs. Replacing the oldest lines lifts efficiency, cuts the carbon intensity of the metal at a point when European and American buyers are beginning to price that, and does it without needing new land, a new power connection, a new port or a new workforce. Building a seventh line alongside three obsolete ones would have added tonnes while leaving the plant's average cost position where it is.
The difficulty is the transition. Lines 1, 2 and 3 have to stop before the new capacity starts, which means Alba faces a period in which total output falls before it rises. For a company whose competitive position rests partly on scale, and whose customers include downstream plants next door that depend on continuity of supply, managing that trough is the central engineering and commercial problem of the project. Nothing has been sanctioned; the work is at feasibility stage and subject to government approval.
That downstream dependency is the second half of Bahrain's aluminium story and the reason the smelter matters to the country beyond its export receipts. Roughly 46 percent of Alba's metal is consumed by Bahraini processors rather than shipped as ingot. Gulf Aluminium Rolling Mill takes hot metal into sheet and coil, Bahrain Aluminium Extrusion produces around 25,000 tonnes a year of construction and industrial extrusions, and Midal Cables draws rod into conductor and overhead line for power transmission markets across the region and beyond. Bahrain Atomizers and Aluwheel sit further along the same chain. The cluster works because molten metal can move by road from the potrooms to the processors in minutes, which removes the cost and energy of remelting and is a genuine locational advantage that no amount of subsidy elsewhere reproduces.
The Bahrain Economic Development Board has been building on that, adding an aluminium downstream cluster to its planned industrial zones and attracting specialist plants including the Gulf's first facility making aluminium grain refiners, the master alloys that control grain structure in cast metal. These are small plants in tonnage terms and disproportionately useful in supply chain terms, because they close gaps that would otherwise be filled by imports.
Logistics is the constraint that shapes all of it. Alba operates its own marine terminal for alumina imports and metal exports, which keeps its raw material chain off the public port. Khalifa Bin Salman Port, the kingdom's only commercial port, handles the containerised, general and roll-on roll-off cargo that the downstream plants ship, and the adjacent Bahrain Logistics Zone provides warehousing and processing space; the King Fahd Causeway gives road access to Saudi Arabia and, through it, to the largest construction market in the region.
A record year buys Alba time on a decision it cannot avoid indefinitely. Half its potlines are past fifty, and the metal they make is the most expensive it produces.