Bauxite industry export upbeat on recovery, wary of Chinese dominance

Billy Joe ‘BJ’ Foster, a household name in the bauxite industry in Jamaica and around the world, is this year marking 50 years as a staffer and consultant in the sector.

The Alabama-born chemical engineer, who has held line responsibilities and headed operations for big bauxite-alumina companies Kaiser and Noranda at the Gramercy and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, alumina plants in the United States, and in mining and alumina processing operations in Jamaica, as well as consulted globally, is upbeat about a quick post-pandemic recovery for the industry.

Although disappointed with what he describes as the bottom of the industry having fallen out locally and internationally since the price depression for alumina and the aluminium material it makes, around 2008, Foster believes that s the industry’s future will be brighter in Jamaica if the now-shuttered Alpart plant at Nain in St Elizabeth can be restarted.

He led the engineering work for the 1989 restart of Alpart, then owned by Kaiser, after it was closed for a period in the 1980s, eventually relocating to Jamaica in 1992, and headed operations there as operations director between 1993 and 1995.

Foster’s take on the future is that a good global industry outlook is contingent on a recovery of market share and improved prices for bauxite-alumina companies in the Western world that have been supplanted by mega Chinese firms, which now dominate some 60 per cent of the global market.

Global industry consolidation that has given rise to Chinese firms cornering the bauxite-alumina market, Foster says, has hurt the profitability of Western companies, leading to their demise, with Noranda’s alumina plant in Gramercy, Louisiana, being the sole surviving alumina operation in the United States, from nine when he started out in the industry in 1971.

But Foster is confident that the Gramercy-St Ann partnership is on sound footing and will continue. This view is aided by the expert’s view that available bauxite deposits in Jamaica run in several hundred million tonnes, enough to last well into the future being mined in an environmentally conscious way. He does not subscribe to the view that Jamaica’s bauxite industry is a mature one that is on the decline.

“It depends of the definition of mature. Just because one is mature doesn’t mean you’re going to fall over and die the next day. Yes, the industry is mature, but it has a long mature life. Is it 20, 30, or 40 years? I don’t know, but I know it is not one or two years,” he told the Financial Gleaner in an interview.

“It has provided a good livelihood for many Jamaicans. If I was investing, I would put my money in getting Alpart up and running as opposed to building a brand-new plant. It is now owned by the Chinese. I don’t know what are they going to do, sell it or get it going. There are enough available reserves to supply the industry for a while,” he said, referencing what he said were recent talks in the industry about building a new bauxite-alumina plant around the Ocho Rios area of St Ann.

He noted that at the time of its most recent closure, Alpart was producing about 1.7 million tons of alumina per year from approximately five million wet tons of bauxite.

He said, too, that with Noranda Bauxite in St Ann shipping about 3.5 million tonnes of bauxite to Noranda’s alumina Gramercy refinery, the Louisiana plant cannot take much more bauxite without expansion from its current production capacity of about 1.16 million tons of alumina per year.

Having entered the industry because he was “intrigued” by the Kaiser operations in Louisiana and the offer the company made him fresh out of Louisiana State University in 1971, Foster developed a relationship with Jamaica quite by accident, literally, in 1985, and has been somewhat of a fixture in the country’s bauxite sector since then. His Jamaican connection started when a Russian freighter accidentally ran into the Kaiser pier in St Ann, and BJ and a crew of engineers out of Louisiana were summoned to Jamaica the same day to start a repair job that would take one week before the bauxite-laden red earth could again be loaded on to ships and one month before the gantry crane loading the ships could properly run again.

“That sort of introduced me to St Ann,” said Foster, who grew up in Pensacola, Florida, but who worked in nine petrochemical plants in Louisiana before working in the bauxite-alumina sector.

His first and only visit to Jamaica before the 1985 repair job was to scout for equipment from the shuttered Rivera plant at Maggotty in St Elizabeth in 1976.

Foster rose to the position of vice-president for Kaiser Alumina technical services group with responsibility for capital spending in the US, Jamaica, and Australia, and says that in the nearly 40 years of working in Jamaica, he has travelled to the country at least once every two months, and in some years, made as many of 24 trips to the island.

Foster says that he has been trying to retire since 1992. He eventually retired from Kaiser in October 2002 but since then has worked as a consultant with Kaiser, its later owner Noranda, and other companies in Jamaica, Australia, Europe, Africa, and Russia. Since 2007, he has shed all international assignments except Noranda Gramercy and Jamaica.

“Today, I have a lot of flexibility in terms of what I work on. It gives me a perspective on what problems exist and using my years of experience, what resources we need to apply to solve these problems,” Foster explains.

Despite the criticisms of the bauxite industry, Foster is of the view that the industry has been a good steward of the Jamaican land and environment and has contributed more in the development of physical infrastructure, water supplies, agriculture, education and health than it has taken from the country.

He declined to comment on the current controversy involving mining in Jamaica’s ecologically sensitive Cockpit Country, noting that he has never worked in that physical area and has not been part of discussions concerning operations there.

“I think we are and have been good corporate citizens. We obey the rules. It is possible to mine bauxite, be an industrial facility and not poison land and to maintain environmental control,” he said.

“If I had my career to do over, I would have done the same thing. I probably would have come to Jamaica a lot sooner. I have enjoyed the industry and enjoyed the companionship with my many friends in Jamaica,” BJ Foster said in reflection.

huntley.medley@gleanerjm.com