USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries - Aluminum

USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries - Aluminum is the Aluminum catalog's baseline record: the two-page aluminum chapter of the U.S. Geological Survey's annual Mineral Commodity Summaries volume, delivered by Datadory as structured, analysis-ready rows. Each edition compresses the entire American aluminum economy onto a single statistical spread - a five-year salient statistics table carrying primary production, secondary production split between old and new scrap, imports and exports of both metal and scrap, apparent consumption and apparent supply, the average US market spot price for ingot, year-end industry stocks and LME US warehouse stocks, employment in alumina and aluminum production, and net import reliance as a share of apparent consumption.

Around that table sit the narrative sections analysts actually cite: domestic production and use with end-use shares, recycling volumes with the new-versus-old scrap split, import sources by country share, tariff lines with their ad valorem rates, the government stockpile acquisition and disposal schedule, an events-trends-and-issues review, a world smelter production and capacity table spanning thirteen named producing countries plus a world total, world bauxite resource estimates, and substitutes.

The series has run since the 1930s, which makes it the longest continuous official citation for national and global aluminum fundamentals - and the reference point the rest of Datadory's 1,744-dataset metals shelf reconciles against. This record scores 9/10 in our quality model.

Three row families carry the chapter - a salient-statistics observation for the United States, a country-level world production and capacity cell, and an import-source share. Exactly as the rows land after cleaning:

FAMILY: US salient statistics row
year                          : 2024
primary_production_kt         : 670
secondary_old_scrap_kt        : 1600
secondary_new_scrap_kt        : 2000
imports_crude_semi_kt         : 4800
exports_scrap_kt              : 1600
apparent_consumption_kt       : 4300
price_us_spot_cents_per_lb    : 130

FAMILY: world smelter row (prior year)
year                          : 2023
primary_production_kt         : 750
secondary_old_scrap_kt        : 1560
secondary_new_scrap_kt        : 1870
imports_crude_semi_kt         : 4890
exports_scrap_kt              : 2060
apparent_consumption_kt       : 4150
price_us_spot_cents_per_lb    : 125.9

FAMILY: country production & capacity cell
country                       : China
smelter_production_2024e_kt   : 43000
yearend_capacity_2024e_kt_yr  : 44700

country                       : United States
smelter_production_2024e_kt   : 670
yearend_capacity_2024e_kt_yr  : 1360

FAMILY: import-source share
import_source                 : Canada
share_of_2020_23_imports_pct  : 56

Estimated cells keep their 'e' flag and revised cells their 'r' flag as metadata, so a provisional figure never masquerades as a final one downstream.

Every column below is drawn from the chapter itself, definitions written against the printed table headers:

Fourteen fields cover the whole chapter, and the pair worth reading together is production against capacity: the world table reports China at 43,000 thousand metric tons of 2024 smelter output against 44,700 thousand metric tons of year-end capacity, while the United States shows 670 against 1,360 - two very different stories about how close each industry runs to its ceiling, told entirely with official columns.

• Geography: United States in full detail, plus world smelter production and year-end capacity for thirteen major producing countries - Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Iceland, India, Malaysia, Norway, Russia, the UAE and the United States among them - alongside an other-countries line and a world total. Import sources are broken out by country share.
• Temporal: each edition stacks the five most recent complete years in its salient statistics table - 2020 through 2024e in the January 2025 edition - and the series itself reaches back to the 1930s, so multi-decade views assemble cleanly from consecutive editions.
• Granularity: national annual totals for every US series; country-level annual production and capacity on the world side; product-class level for trade (crude and semimanufactures versus scrap) and end-use shares by sector.

No other single record pairs a five-year American balance sheet with a thirteen-country world capacity table in two pages.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel and the cadence when you request the sample; the rows arrive identical either way - cleaned, typed, and documented against the field dictionary above. The chapter prints its figures rounded inside a typeset page; Datadory hands you the underlying numbers as structured columns, with estimate and revision flags preserved as metadata so you always know how settled each cell claimed to be.

A one-page federal baseline earns its keep across four specific jobs:

• Smelting and recycling operators - the world production-versus-capacity table for siting context, and the domestic secondary figures (1,600 thousand metric tons from old scrap, 2,000 from new scrap in 2024) for sizing the US recovery business they compete in.
• Investors and quant researchers - the average US ingot price ($1.30 a pound spot in 2024, $1.259 in 2023) sitting next to the production, stocks and import-reliance columns that explain it, five years deep in one pull.
• Trade and supply-chain analysts - import sources quantified by country (Canada alone supplied 56% of US imports across 2020-2023), tariff lines with their rates, and net import reliance of 47% of apparent consumption as the dependency headline.
• Market researchers, consultants and policy teams - the end-use mix (transportation 36%, packaging 23%, building 14%, electrical 9%) for demand-side sizing, plus employment of roughly 30,000 workers in NAICS 3313 and the government stockpile schedule for the policy overlay.

Market Researchers & Consultants get scope, geography and years answerable from the coverage alone. Investors & Quant Researchers get a citable federal price series with its fundamentals attached. Competitive Intelligence & Product Teams get the thirteen-country capacity table that flags where the next supply wave comes from. Journalists, Academics & Students get the standard citation, structured rather than retyped from a PDF.

Methodology note - the chapter is compiled by the USGS National Minerals Information Center from government and industry sources, with estimated values flagged 'e' and revised values flagged 'r' in the tables. Apparent consumption and net import reliance are derived identities - production plus secondary from old scrap plus imports minus exports, adjusted for stock changes, with imported scrap excluded - so reconcile them as balances rather than survey counts.

Scope note - the same volume carries roughly ninety commodities, which makes the aluminum chapter trivially comparable against its copper, steel and bauxite siblings on identical column definitions.

Provenance note - every edition names its preparing analyst, so each statistic has a traceable federal chain of custody instead of an aggregator's silent revision history.

Where to go next:

• USGS Mineral Yearbook - Aluminum and Bauxite chapters - the deep-history companion, with company-level capacity and bilateral trade detail this one-pager compresses away.
• The Aluminum Association Industry Statistics - the industry-association series behind shipments and orders at monthly grain.
• Trading Economics Aluminum Commodity Page - exchange-traded price context around the chapter's annual averages.
• IndexMundi Aluminum Monthly Price - monthly price granularity between the chapter's annual snapshots.