HWNEWS
A gigawatt smelter, a rural town, and the price of doubling U.S. aluminum
Oklahoma's $4 billion Inola project would more than double U.S. primary capacity. The power contract, the AG's suit, and a UAE state owner are still unsettled.
Oklahoma's $4 billion Inola project would more than double U.S. primary capacity. The power contract, the AG's suit, and a UAE state owner are still unsettled.
A $4 billion aluminum smelter planned for the Verdigris River in northeastern Oklahoma would, on paper, do something the U.S. has not done in nearly half a century: add a domestic primary aluminum plant at a scale large enough to move the country's supply balance. The project from Oklahoma Primary Aluminum, a 60/40 joint venture between Emirates Global Aluminium and Century Aluminum, would produce more than 750,000 metric tons of primary aluminum a year on roughly 350 acres at the Port of Inola. According to Canary Media, that output would more than double current U.S. primary capacity. The last American smelter of any size came online in 1980.
The plant is also the kind of project that, in a normal policy debate, would turn on power, water, and air. Here it is doing all three at once, and the politics have piled on top.
Three unresolved decisions will determine whether it gets built. None of them is settled.
The first is the power contract. OPA needs more than a gigawatt of continuous electricity, and that load has been in negotiation with Public Service Company of Oklahoma, an AEP subsidiary, for more than a year. The contract is subject to review by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and the question of who actually pays, the utility, the developer, or ratepayers, has not been disclosed. Without a signed agreement, there is no project.
The second is the lawsuit. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, filed suit in Rogers County the week of June 2 to block the smelter, alleging threatened pollution and public nuisance. The petition's "index date" is May 19, the day OPA completed its state air-quality permit application. Drummond has denied the suit is retaliatory. Governor Kevin Stitt has called the action "weaponizing" the office of the attorney general to retaliate against President Trump's industrial agenda. The suit asks for an injunction; nothing in the public record indicates construction has stopped.
The third is the ownership question. EGA is a state-owned enterprise of the United Arab Emirates. Century Aluminum is a U.S. producer. Mike Mazzei, now the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, criticized the project's tax incentives at a March 30 debate on the grounds that OPA is majority-owned by a foreign sovereign. President Trump endorsed Mazzei for governor on May 29, hours after Mazzei posted support for the smelter.
That sequence is what has made the project a proxy for the governor's race. The deeper question is whether the industrial-policy case for the smelter survives the case against it.
The industrial-policy case is real. Aluminum is the metal in fighter jets, warships, helicopter airframes, and ammunition casings. China produces roughly 60 percent of the world's primary aluminum. The White House announced the Oklahoma project in May 2025, in the same policy window that has pushed reshoring of semiconductors, batteries, and rare-earth processing. OPA says its plant will run EGA's next-generation EX smelter technology, which the developer claims uses about a third less electricity per ton than the legacy U.S. fleet. That figure is the developer's, not an independent benchmark. The legacy fleet is also four and a half decades old.
The community case against the project is also real. Inola sits at the intersection of Rogers and Mayes counties, where residents have organized around air, water, and grid concerns for more than a year. The Oklahoma Watch reporting from Inola in March captured the bipartisan texture of the opposition: Trump-voting farmers worried about the fluoride, sulfur dioxide, and per- and polyfluorinated substances that older U.S. smelters have historically emitted, and about what a gigawatt of new load on the local grid does to their electric bills. A fall 2025 statewide survey by Industrious Labs, a clean-industry advocacy group, found 62 percent of Oklahomans supported the project. That is not a neutral benchmark; it is a labeled public-sentiment reading from a group with a policy stake.
Drummond's legal theory is the part that does not yet hold up on the merits. Public nuisance claims against industrial facilities are an uphill fight in Oklahoma, and the petition has not yet been tested in pleadings from OPA, EGA, or Public Service Company of Oklahoma. The air-quality permit application is at the front end of its review, not the back.
The genuine stress test sits at the power contract. A gigawatt of continuous load is, in practical terms, a small power plant's worth of demand. PSO's resource mix is gas-heavy, with growing wind and some solar. The Corporation Commission's review will turn on what OPA is willing to commit to, what PSO is willing to build, and what portion of the cost falls on ratepayers who are not EGA or Century shareholders. That is a question the developer has financial reasons to defer, and that the AG's office has political reasons to dramatize. Neither framing is the whole answer.
What to watch next: the Corporation Commission docket, the response pleading in Drummond's Rogers County case, and any disclosure of who signs the power supply agreement first, and on what terms.