With the continuous release of domestic alumina production capacity and the introduction of national environmental protection policies, the balance of supply and demand of alumina raw materials in inland China has undergone major changes. Especially since May 2018, the supply of bauxite in henan and shanxi has been tight, and the price of bauxite has risen sharply. China's inland alumina factories have started to use imported ore as raw material supplement.Background and current situation of using imported minesDomestic ore prices rose sharply, domestic demand is a big gap, import demand surged. By the end of 2018, China's henan and shanxi provinces had a shortfall of about 2.5 million tons of ore. The mine gap is expected to be around 18 million tons in 2019. 

A large gap in ore demand has caused bauxite prices to rise sharply. At present, the price of imported ore is almost the same as that of domestic ore. If the price of domestic ore continues to rise, the advantage of imported ore will be more and more obvious. By October 2018, China's completed alumina production capacity, which mainly relies on imported bauxite, had increased to 31.6 million tons, while its operating capacity had also risen to 29.8 million tons.Based on the current alumina production capacity, China's total import demand for bauxite in 2018 is 71.65 million tons. As domestic production of bauxite is affected by environmental protection and mine regulation and other factors to reduce supply, more alumina companies will use imported bauxite, especially in shanxi, henan and other places, the import of bauxite is expected to increase to 74 million to 78 million tons.In the past half year, the price of domestic bauxite increased gradually. Comparatively speaking, the import price of bauxite is stable, and the import price of bauxite even decreases slightly in some countries. If environmental protection and mine regulation in shanxi and henan are not relaxed in the future, the price of bauxite in China will still rise, and the price difference between domestic and foreign bauxite will narrow again, and even the price of bauxite in China will be higher than that of imported ore.Bauxite metallogenic belts are mainly distributed in Africa, Oceania, South America and southeast Asia. 

The implementation of a series of environmental protection renovation projects, such as the transformation of power plant, roaster with ultra-low emission, and gas desulfurization, has alleviated the pressure of enterprise environmental protection to some extent. In recent years, many scientific researchers and industrial enterprises have carried out a lot of research and exploration on the comprehensive utilization of red mud, such as building roads with red mud, making ceramic balls with red mud, etc., but they have not been put into large-scale application due to the high processing cost.Now the grade of ore in China has dropped sharply and the effective components in red mud have been approached. At present, the main and feasible methods are high silicon red mud energy saving series method and recovery of iron, titanium and other elements in red mud by high iron red mud. These two methods have been applied industrially in dongfang hope and jinjiang subordinate enterprises. To some extent, this alleviates the huge pressure caused by ore grade decline on enterprise operation. This is the trend of survival and development of domestic alumina enterprises. I believe that in the future more enterprises will join the team to explore the comprehensive utilization of red mud.According to the current changes in the bauxite market and the future development trend, we believe that the industry competition pattern will change, that is, mainly rely on imported ore to alleviate the existing capacity production "crisis". However, according to the development trend of alumina industry, when enterprises make investment layout, the environmental protection policies in port cities or southwest regions will be relatively relaxed, and these cities may get development opportunities. The opportunities and competition for alumina in the big bauxite producers overseas (Indonesia, guinea, Vietnam, etc.) will become more intense. (from China nonferrous metals news)