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Century Aluminum makes primary aluminum and alumina, the raw ingredients that go into everything from cars to cans.
Century Aluminum is one of the few American companies that still makes primary aluminum — the pure metal that gets turned into cars, cans, window frames, and a thousand other things. It runs big smelters in the United States and Iceland, plus an alumina refinery that supplies the raw material those smelters need.
The business is brutally simple and brutally hard. Aluminum smelting eats enormous amounts of electricity, so the plant's power bill often decides whether it makes money or loses it. Century has spent years fighting over who supplies that power and at what price, especially at its big Kentucky smelter, where a dispute with its electricity supplier nearly forced a shutdown before a new contract kept the plant running. It also faces cheap imports and the fact that China dominates global aluminum production. Aluminum itself is a strange commodity: light, strong, and endlessly recyclable, which makes it increasingly attractive to carmakers trying to shed weight and to the packaging industry. But the price is set by global markets, not by Century, so the company mostly competes on cost — cheap power, efficient plants — rather than on brand or service. Its customers are industrial buyers who care about price and reliability, not who made the metal.
Century's results swing hard with aluminum prices and energy costs, which makes it a cyclical, sometimes fragile business. It has been profitable in good years and has burned through cash in bad ones. With the U.S. pushing to rebuild domestic manufacturing and secure its own metal supply, the company's American smelters have become strategically interesting again — but that doesn't change the basic math: cheap electricity is what keeps Century alive.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026