Aluminium by Country: Smelted Where Power Is Cheap
China smelts nearly 60 percent of the world's aluminium. Iceland and Bahrain, with almost no bauxite, still make the top ten, on electricity alone.
The map that geology alone cannot explain
China’s dominance reflects scale of investment and power generation built specifically for smelting, covered on this material’s supply chain page, not domestic bauxite wealth, China has comparatively modest reserves relative to its output. Further down the list, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Iceland appear because of cheap gas or hydro power, not because any of them host meaningful bauxite deposits.
Why this ranking will not look like any other material’s
Every other material on this site shows at least some correlation between where the mineral resource sits and where production happens. Aluminium’s country ranking is the clearest counterexample in the whole series: it is fundamentally an energy-market map wearing a metal-production label.
Sources: production figures reference this project’s own verified production data (International Aluminium Institute, USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025).