Reuters reported that Qatar's Qatalum aluminium smelter will resume production in a few days and now aims to hit full capacity by the end of the Q1 of 2011.
The 50/50 JV between Qatar Petroleum and Hydro had originally planned to reach full production by the end of 2010 but an August power failure delayed those plans.
Qatalum has a design capacity of 585,000 tonnes from total of 704 production cells. 444 of the cells had been started by the time the plant lost power on August 10 forcing a restart.
Hydro said that the 260 cells that had not yet been in production would continue their rampup as planned. The clean out of the 444 cells that were affected by the power outage is well underway and the planned restart is expected to commence by mid September.
