We have Century Aluminum. Century is a primary aluminum producer operating three smelters in the U.S. and one smelter in Iceland. The company also has a 55% interest in Jamalco, which is an alumina refinery in Jamaica. Joining us today is President and CEO Jesse Gary. Jesse, over to you.
Thank you. Hi to everybody. As Katja said, my name is Jesse Gary. I'm the President and CEO of Century. So Century Aluminum is today the largest producer of aluminum in the United States. We also operate a world-class business in Iceland that mostly sells into the European market. And as Katja said, we recently purchased a 55% stake in the Jamalco alumina refinery in Jamaica. So over the past three years, we've been on a bit of a journey to de-commoditize our products. We've been investing in cast house capacity. The biggest project there has been building a new 150,000-ton billet cast house in Iceland, and that'll be complete Q1 at the end of this quarter. And we've also been expanding our U.S. cast house capacity.
So going forward, starting in 2025, we'll be able to produce about 80% of our product mix as value-added product, and de-commoditizing ourselves. The other big acquisition has been in Jamalco this year. Many of you who are familiar with Century know that we've long been short alumina production. And with our Jamalco acquisition, which was completed in May of this past year, we were able to balance ourselves. So we control 55% of the asset, which is about between 600,000-700,000 tons of production. It's about half of our needs, and the other half is served under long-term offtake agreements. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the macro side on aluminum.
We've been through a bit of a confounding year in the aluminum space, where we've seen some of the stronger markets actually have some headwinds in aluminum demand, whereas some of the weaker macro markets have had very strong aluminum demand. So specifically in China, we've seen very, very strong aluminum demand growth over the 2023, and we actually saw the market become very short. China, for the first time, imported 1.3 million tons of production. If you look at the graph on the bottom left side of the screen, we actually see that expanding over the next couple of years. And this is largely driven by some of the big macro drivers that will drive aluminum demand over the rest of the world, which is increased EV production and renewable energy generation.
So what we see, if you look at the bottom right here, you can see the scale of EV sales increase coming out of China, which has been marked almost step by step by increased renewable energy generation. And this is driving that strong aluminum demand, which really supports the premise that we've seen in aluminum for the past couple of years, that this green revolution is really going to push aluminum demand and move the market to a quite short position over the next several years and over the medium term. As you can see, the other two main markets in the U.S. and Europe, the markets that we serve, remain very short production.
So if you look at the top right, the U.S. is over 4 million tons short, with Europe over 3 million tons short, which puts our assets in a geographically advantageous position to serve these markets. And as most of you know, each of these markets have large regional delivery premiums in order to balance those markets. One piece that's been a bit of a headwind over the past year has been billet demand in the United States. So there's been some weakness just with the slowing industrial economy, but there is a bit of a bright spot on the horizon coming forward, and that is there's a large extrusion anti-dumping trade case moving forward in the U.S.
So we expect an outcome in this initial outcome in this trade case in May, which will affect about one-third of the total market demand in the United States for extrusions. So the subject countries, there's 14 countries that are subject to this trade case. They bring about in about two-thirds of U.S. aluminum extrusions today. The plaintiffs in this case are seeking dumping margins from anywhere from 40% to 300% dumping margins into the U.S., which means there'll be duties on all these imports coming into the U.S. So if implemented, we expect a decision sometime in May, that would be a real tailwind for U.S. billet demand. And accordingly, we've left open some of our 2024 contractual production in order to meet what we see as increased demand in the back half of the year.
The other big story in our space has been the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which we've long talked about as driving aluminum demand, but we've also seen with Section 45X, a direct tax credit for aluminum production in the United States. So these regulations came out in December, and we booked a $60 million gain in December based on the initial regulations. We've talked quite a bit about that, but this past week, we also submitted comments to U.S. Treasury, and a wide swath of industry attended a hearing at the IRS, discussing one of the exclusions to the 45X, which is a portion of our costs called direct and indirect material costs.
Treasury said they're open to changing these, and importantly, a large subset of senators have recently sent a letter pushing for these costs to be included... If these costs are included, that would be incremental EBITDA for us in 2023, of $50-$55 million, and going forward, you would see our expected benefit under 45X move from $60 million to somewhere in the $110-$115 million a year range. So this is really revolutionary for our U.S. business. It really supports the cost structure of the U.S. business, and would allow us to ultimately expand the U.S. business to meet these new U.S. demand. And Katja, I think that's my prepared portion.
Okay, thank you. So maybe staying on the 45X credit, what would be the potential argument against including the direct and indirect material costs?
Yeah, we don't really think there's too much of an argument. So if you go back to the text of the law, the text of the law is very simple. It says 10% of cost of production, does not mention any sort of cutouts from that cost of production, as eligible cost. And so we think that the statute is quite clear on its face, and it's telling that the main drafter of the statute, Senator Manchin, has come out and said that he also agrees, that it was intended to be a broad credit equal to 10% of those production costs, and not to include any of these excluded categories.
Are there any other possible benefits from the IRA that you could receive?
Yeah, there's a lot of demand-side benefits, also some potential additional, capital investment, credits that we could receive directly. But, you know, more broadly speaking, on the demand side, there's a lot of incentives towards EV production, which as we've long talked about, are more intensive- have much higher aluminum intensity than internal combustion vehicles, upwards of, say, 200 lbs per vehicle. And so that demand side drive from the IRA credit, and from EV conversion and renewable energy conversion, we think is the biggest benefit.
Now, with the presidential election this year, some of the questions we're getting is: Could there be risk to the IRA bill?
Yeah. It's important to remember, of course, that the IRA is a law, right? So it takes a congressional act, it's not really an executive action. So it would take another act of Congress to overturn the law. We don't really see that, and really, when you look at the two primary candidates for president, you know, their views on U.S. industrial production are pretty close. They're both very interested in bringing back U.S. industrial production, which is really the basis of the IRA itself.
Now, in the U.S., the Midwest Premium continues to drift lower, and we have a question from the app: What is a reasonable range for the Midwest Premium, in your view?
Yeah, it's interesting. It has drifted lower. We think that's largely been driven by destocking over the back half of 2023. And in actuality, at its current levels, it's too low in order to bring offshore units into the U.S. So we think that sort of steady state level needs to be substantially higher from where it is today. And so if we do see some demand return to the U.S., some demand growth returning to the U.S., we think you'd see a pretty quick improvement in the Midwest Premium in order to attract those offshore units that will be needed to balance the market.
We have another question from the app: In terms of Jamalco stake, is the main driver security of supply versus economics, given concerns about alumina industry margins and overcapacity?
Yeah, it really serves both of those needs for us. So Century has long been short alumina, and we've also long been the largest customer of Jamalco, so we're very familiar with this, with this very high-quality alumina. So that does give us a very excellent source of secure supply, with very good quality, to use in both our Icelandic and our U.S. smelters, as needed over time. But we also are quite confident that we'll ultimately return this asset to be a second quartile asset on the cost curve, so it should return very good profitability metrics to us going forward.
Then just staying on the Jamalco, the facility has had some issues. You have had some delays in when you expect some of the benefits to materialize. What gives you confidence that you're still gonna get some of these benefits in the second quarter?
Yeah. So we have seen production improve over the course of Q1 so far. So we, we've seen some of that improvement that I talked about on the call that we expect will come. But ultimately, what gives us confidence that we'll achieve that cost structure I mentioned, again, second quartile on the cost curve over time, is this asset has long operated there, and the real issue with the asset was they had a fire in 2021, which damaged the cast house. Most of our initial CapEx will go to just repairing the cast house from that fire, and once complete, the conditions to be second quartile will return to the asset.
So it's really just a matter of time in order to get the CapEx in necessary to rebuild that powerhouse, and once complete, there's really no other change from where it's historically operated on the cost curve.
Maybe one last question: Can you update us on how you think about capital allocation?
Yeah, it's a good question. So, first of all, we'd like to see market conditions improve. Obviously, aluminum prices have been a bit challenged over the past year, but we're really sticking with that base capital allocation model we've been using, basically since I've been CEO, which is to say our first priority here will be to delever, to hit some of those capital allocation targets that we've included. Once we hit that, then we do have some nice long-term organic growth opportunities. For instance, creeping Jamalco production from 1.2 to 1.4 million tons, doing some the Mt. Holly restart, for instance. And then ultimately, with excess cash, we'll always reserve the right to do M&A, but I think you've seen us, we're quite constructive there. We'd like to find bargains.
And then if we do have excess cash from there, we'll return it to shareholders.
Perfect.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.