1932Bahrain
The oil that made the problem
Bahrain is the first Gulf state to find oil — and has the smallest reserves in the region. Everything Alba is follows from those two facts together.
Aluminium Bahrain1968 — 2026
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Bahrain struck oil in 1932, before any of its neighbours, and had the smallest reserves in the Gulf. In 1968 it made the bet that has defined it ever since: an aluminium smelter, in a country with no bauxite, powered by the gas it did have. First metal in May 1971. Fifty-five years later Alba runs the largest single-site smelter in the world, and an entire Bahraini industry grew up around it.
Incorporated 9 August 1968, by Amiri decree First hot metal 11 May 1971 Headquarters Askar, Bahrain Sixtieth anniversary 2031
Bahrain was the first country in the Gulf to find oil, in 1932, and the first to work out that its own would not last. That knowledge shaped everything: while its neighbours were still discovering how rich they were about to become, Bahrain was already asking what it would do afterwards. The answer, taken by Amiri decree on 9 August 1968, was to build a smelter.
It made very little conventional sense. Bahrain has no bauxite and no alumina; every tonne of raw material would have to be shipped in. What it had was gas, and aluminium smelting is essentially a way of turning cheap energy into a solid, exportable form. The foundation stone was laid in January 1969 and the first hot metal ran on 11 May 1971 — 120,000 tonnes a year, and the first aluminium smelter in the Middle East.
What followed was not one plant but a sequence: Line 3 in 1981, Line 4 and a power station in 1992, a calciner in 2002, Line 5 in 2005 at $1.7 billion, and then Line 6, which took first hot metal on 13 December 2018 and was inaugurated eleven months later. Bechtel built it in twenty-four months against an industry standard of thirty, about sixteen per cent under budget, and it made Alba the largest single-site aluminium smelter in the world.
The more interesting achievement is what grew around it. Midal Cables and Balexco in 1977, GARMCO in 1981 — a downstream cluster that exists because there was liquid metal next door. By 2015 Alba was 11.5 per cent of Bahrain’s total exports and 30.1 per cent of everything it sold that was not oil. Its workforce is 87 per cent Bahraini. This is the clearest example in the region of an industrial policy that worked.
And in March 2026 an Iranian missile hit the plant. What follows is fifty-eight years as they can be documented, difficult parts included.
Era I
1968 — 1971
A decree, a foundation stone, and the first aluminium smelter in the Middle East.
1932Bahrain
Bahrain is the first Gulf state to find oil — and has the smallest reserves in the region. Everything Alba is follows from those two facts together.
1968·08·09Manama
Aluminium Bahrain is created as a state industrial project. No source found gives the founding shareholders or their percentages. SABIC, sometimes named, did not exist until 1976.
1969·01Askar
The stone is laid on 6 January and building begins on 23 January.
1971·05·11Askar
120,000 tonnes a year, and the first aluminium smelter in the Middle East. This is the date Alba appears to count from — its own history marks a golden jubilee in 2021.
Era II
1971 — 1990
The smelter becomes a national institution, and an industry assembles itself next door.
1977Bahrain
Midal is founded by Bahrain’s Intersteel with Australia’s Olex Cables, the first Gulf maker of overhead conductors and aluminium rod; Balexco is the first extrusion plant in the Arabian Gulf. Both exist because Alba is next door.
1980
Cumulative production passes the mark.
1981·05·25Askar
Inaugurated, adding 50,000 tonnes to reach 170,000 a year.
1981Bahrain
Six Gulf governments — Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Iraq — found the Gulf Aluminium Rolling Mill, which becomes the largest flat-rolling operation in the Middle East.
Era III
1990 — 2002
Capacity roughly doubles, and Alba starts making its own inputs.
1992·05·18Askar
Line 4 adds 235,000 tonnes and an 800 MW power station is commissioned. Total capacity reaches 440,000 tonnes a year.
1997
A 76-cell expansion of Line 3 takes capacity to about 500,000 tonnes.
2002·01·30Askar
450,000 tonnes a year of capacity, bringing a critical input in-house.
Era IV
2002 — 2010
A $1.7 billion expansion, then the end of full state ownership.
2005·09·05Askar
A $1.7 billion investment adding 307,000 tonnes and taking Alba past 830,000 tonnes a year.
2008Pittsburgh
A civil racketeering suit alleging a fifteen-year conspiracy of overcharging and bribery, with more than $2 billion said to have been routed through intermediaries in Singapore, Switzerland and Guernsey. The US Department of Justice intervenes within weeks and the civil case is stayed.
2010Manama · London
Alba lists on Bahrain Bourse and the London Stock Exchange at 900 fils a share, ending full state ownership.
Era V
2010 — 2019
The expansion that made it the largest single-site smelter in the world.
2012·10·09Pittsburgh
Without admitting liability; a dismissal with prejudice is filed the same day. The second half is paid in October 2013.
2013·12London
The prosecution of Victor Dahdaleh, Alcoa’s agent, falls apart. He was never convicted. Alba’s own former chief executive Bruce Hall, extradited from Australia in October 2010, was jailed in the United Kingdom.
2014·01·09Washington
One count under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Combined penalties of $384 million — $223 million to the Department of Justice and $161 million to the SEC.
2015Askar
The board approves the expansion explicitly to make Alba the world’s largest single-site smelter.
2017·04·13Askar
Roughly three hours. Line 5 is not fully restored until the third quarter, and full-year output falls three to five per cent.
2018·12·13Askar
Ahead of its 1 January target. Bechtel built it in twenty-four months against an industry standard of about thirty — the fastest smelter line in the industry’s history.
2019·11·24Askar
Capacity about 1.54 million tonnes a year, roughly sixteen per cent under budget. Some trade coverage qualifies the “largest single-site” claim as ex-China; Alba’s own material does not.
Era VI
2020 — 2026
Records, a reshuffled register, and then a missile.
2021
1,561,222 tonnes, and 24.5 million working hours without a lost-time injury. Alba’s own history marks fifty years — counted from 1971.
2022
Another record, and 30 million safe working hours.
2025·01·13Manama · Riyadh
Talks to merge Alba into Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden, running through 2024, are mutually terminated.
2025·02
Its entire 20.62 per cent stake, for roughly $1 billion. Ownership becomes Mumtalakat 69.38, Ma’aden 20.62, public 10.
2026·03·28Askar
Two employees are injured. The Revolutionary Guard claims responsibility as part of a wider campaign against Gulf industrial sites. Alba had already cut about nineteen per cent of capacity, shut Lines 1, 2 and 3 and declared force majeure; a ceasefire follows on 7 April, but restarting frozen reduction cells takes months.
2026·Q2
Net finished production of 155,469 tonnes against a year earlier, while profit rose to $172.5 million on price. First-half profit $372.8 million.
A country with no bauxite built the largest smelter in the world, and an industry around it.
1968 · a decree · and the knowledge of how it was actually done
The difficult chapters
Alba’s history includes a major corruption case in which it was the plaintiff and its own former chief executive was jailed. Omitting that would make the rest of this page worthless.
Alba sued, alleging a fifteen-year conspiracy and more than $2 billion routed through intermediaries. Alcoa settled with Alba for $85 million in October 2012 without admitting liability, and in January 2014 Alcoa World Alumina pleaded guilty to one FCPA count, with $384 million in combined penalties. Alba was the injured party in the American proceedings.
Bruce Hall, Alba’s former chief executive, was extradited from Australia in October 2010 to face UK charges of corruptly accepting the bribes, and was jailed. The parallel prosecution of Alcoa’s agent Victor Dahdaleh collapsed in December 2013; he was never convicted.
An Iranian missile hit an operating smelter and injured two people. Alba had already shut three lines and declared force majeure. Whatever else is written about 2026, this is the year the plant was attacked.
A power outage of about three hours damaged the line badly enough that it was not fully restored for two quarters, costing three to five per cent of the year’s output. In a smelter, losing power means losing the pots.
No chief executive of Alba between 1971 and the early 1990s could be found in any public source. Twenty years covering the first three production lines, unattributed.
No source found gives the 1968 shareholders or their percentages. For a company this consequential, the cap table at incorporation is simply not public.
The people who built it
Three chief executives and two chairmen, all from the last thirty years. Nobody from the founding, the construction, the first metal or the first three lines appears anywhere public.
Ali Al-Baqali’s 2019 appointment was framed explicitly as part of Bahrainising the company’s senior positions — a stated policy, and a dated one. Who ran Alba for its first two decades is not established anywhere.
Fifty-eight years, in figures
Capacity grew from 120,000 tonnes in 1971 to 170,000 in 1981, 440,000 in 1992, about 500,000 in 1997, 830,000 in 2005 and roughly 1.54 million after Line 6 in 2019. Record output of 1,600,111 tonnes in 2022. In 2015 Alba accounted for 11.5 per cent of Bahrain’s total exports and consumed more than a quarter of the country’s unassociated gas; no comparable current figure has been published. An employee count of 3,179 for 2024 is single-sourced and looks low — treat it with caution.
What is not recorded
Every one of these sits at the centre of how Bahrain built an industry, and the answers are held by people who are reachable now.
Who argued for a smelter in a country with no bauxite, what it was weighed against, and how it was financed. Not one primary account exists.
The shareholders at incorporation and their percentages are not public anywhere.
Two decades and three production lines with no named chief executive in any source.
Midal, Balexco and GARMCO exist because Alba does. Whether that was designed or simply happened — and by whom — is undocumented.
Eighty-seven per cent of the workforce is Bahraini and the first Bahraini chief executive was appointed in 2019. How that was achieved, over what period, is nowhere written.
The fastest smelter line ever built, and under budget. The method that produced it is exactly what another country would pay for, and it exists only in the memories of the team that did it.
None of this is obscure. That is what the founding directory is for.
Why this anniversary is different
Alba’s own history marks a golden jubilee in 2021, which counts from first metal in 1971 rather than incorporation in 1968. On that basis the sixtieth falls in 2031, and the sixtieth of the decree in 2028. Either way the arithmetic points the same direction: anyone who was there when the first metal ran is now in their eighties.
That is the whole argument for doing this at Alba before the anniversary rather than during it. The Line 1 generation is nearly gone. The people who built Lines 3 and 4 in the eighties and nineties are retiring. And the Line 6 team — who built the fastest smelter line in the industry’s history, in twenty-four months and under budget — are working now and have never been asked how they did it.
Alba has no alumni network, and neither does any other Bahraini institution we checked, in English or Arabic. For the company that gave Bahrain an industry after its oil, that is a strange absence.
Across reduction, casthouse, carbon and the calciner, power generation, engineering and projects, marketing and sales, safety, and leadership — Bahraini and expatriate, from Line 1 to Line 6.
One structured hour each. Not nostalgia — method. How a line was commissioned, how a potroom was recovered after a power loss, how the downstream cluster was brought in, and what they would do differently.
Tagged to a person, a period, a function and a milestone, so the next country trying to build a heavy industry from nothing can find the answer rather than reinvent it.
Compiled from Alba’s own history, corporate profile and board pages, AGBI, MEED, Light Metal Age, AlCircle, Bechtel, Gulf News, Gulf Business, The National, Zawya, Aluminium Today, Oxford Business Group and CIDOB on Bahrain’s export structure, the histories of Midal, Balexco and GARMCO, the FCPA Blog, CNBC and the World Bank’s asset-recovery database on the Alcoa proceedings, WilmerHale and the South China Morning Post on the SFO case, and Alba’s own statement and wire coverage of the March 2026 strike. Where sources disagree — the founding shareholders, the “ex-China” qualifier, the employee count — this account gives what is documented and says where the record runs out.
Incorporation was 9 August 1968; first hot metal 11 May 1971. They are not the same event. This is an independent alumni project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a property of Aluminium Bahrain.