NEW YORK -- The Hydro Aluminum Metal Products division of Norway's Norsk Hydro AS said Monday it will spend $33 million to build a 90,000-tonne-per-year aluminum remelt plant in Henderson, Ky., to provide feedstock for competitively priced extrusion billet it will sell in a U.S. market it contends is metal-short.

Through its Hydro Aluminium Extrusions unit, Oslo-based Norsk Hydro ranks as one of the world's largest aluminum extruders, with plants in the United States and Europe.

Hydro Aluminum Metal Products said that its billet would match primary aluminum billet in quality and it had a built-in cost advantage that could be offered to extruder customers because reclaimed aluminum needs but 5 percent of the energy required to make primary metal.

James Walters, president of Hydro Aluminum Metal Products' Kentucky-based U.S. arm, Hydro Aluminum Louisville Inc., said there would not necessarily be a direct price advantage vis-avis primary billet and that the economy would be derived from a better quality compared with other secondary billet. Walters

said that the secondary billet would be "interchangeable with primary-quality aluminum produced from smelters." The new unit, is expected to be up and running in 2001.

Walters said that the Louisville unit also handles the parent company's extensive trading activities in the U.S. and markets primary metal drawn from tolling agreements with Northwest Aluminum Inc.'s Goldendale, Wash., smelter primary aluminum smelter--for which Norsk Hydro and Northwest Aluminum late last year launched a $55-million project that will boost capacity of the 168,000-tonne-a-year smelter by 15 percent (AMM, Oct. 12, 1998)

Walters said the aluminum industry is "not producing enough (billet) to meet current and expected demand, in particular from the transportation and building and construction industries."

The latest tally from the Aluminum Association put the U.S., aluminum industry's incoming orders for extruded shapes and tube through May 13.9 percent ahead of the pace for the same 1998 period. A considerable backlog is implied, inasmuch as the industry had only a 2.8-percent lead at the shipping dock in the first four months of the year.