Century CEO says Okla. smelter online sooner if permits expedited, brushes off power concerns

Permitting: from fast to faster

“We can build the smelter much faster than that timeline. Permitting is really something that slows it down,” Gary said. “We can’t even break ground for some period of time, even though we’re ready to go today.”

Gary made the comments during a panel discussion at the SAFE Summit last week in Washington, D.C.

Commerce Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Joshua Kroon also spoke at the event. The Trump administration has already worked to streamline permitting. And those efforts will continue, he said.

“It’s never been easier to get permits in the United Sates than it’s been in the last year,” Kroon said. “There is a lot of work to be done, but we’re committed to doing that.”

As Kroon sees it, the challenge for new projects is no longer capital or permits. Instead, it’s finding companies with big ambitions when it comes to rebuilding domestic manufacturing and the ability to act on those ambitions quickly.

“We’ve been admiring this challenge for 34 years, and we’re done admiring,” Kroon said. “We have the political will. We have the capital. And so then it’s coming down to (finding) good operators like Century. That’s our biggest challenge, good operators.”

Who gets the juice?

Another potential challenge comes from securing enough electricity to power a smelter that should have capacity of 750,000 metric tons per year (tpy) – a number that will double current US production capacity.

The biggest smelter operating now in the US (and there are only four of them) has capacity of 250,000 tpy. The Oklahoma facility will also sport “the largest single potline to be built in the world,” Gary said.

But Gary insisted the issue of securing enough power wasn’t insurmountable. “We need enough power, and we need that to be reliable power, and we need it to be competitively priced power,” he said. “The good news is that there are areas in this country where you can still find that, and that’s how we came to Oklahoma.”

The smelter is being built in Inola, Okla., about 30 miles east of Tulsa.

And it doesn’t hurt that the Trump administration sees domestic aluminum production as a national security matter.

“So given that aluminum is essential for national security, the energy for aluminum production is also essential,” Gary said. “And we’re talking gigawatts of energy to power these new, modern smelters.”

Kroon, too, was optimistic that solutions could be found to a growing energy dilemma – namely, how to allocate electricity between heavy industry and the booming AI/data center sector.

“We’re not Wall Street,” he said. “Government support is something that can be different. It’s not just financial support. It can be policy support. There are a lot of things we can do, a lot of tools that the government has.”

We need all of the above

Gary pointed to President Trump’s own words to justify his optimism about the US finding a balance between traditional industries and tech.

“He says, ‘If you don’t have steel, you don’t have aluminum, you don’t have a country,” Gary said. “Well, it’s certainly true also that if you don’t have data centers, you don’t have a country – so we need all of these things to be here.”

And the Iran war has underscored the importance of being able to make things domestically – whether that’s steel, aluminum, or electrons.

The US makes only 15% of the primary aluminum it requires and thus relies heavily on imports, according to SAFE, a think tank focused on energy, national security, and supply chains. In 2000, in contrast, the US had 23 smelters producing 3.5 million tpy and was the world’s leading primary aluminum producer.

The result of losing that capacity? “You see how fragile supply chains are today,” Gary said. “For instance, 20% of US imports of aluminum came in from the Middle East. Well, it’s not coming in today—and so the truth is, we need to be able to produce this at home. And if we can’t, then we’re in big trouble.”