Rio restarts some capacity at NZ aluminium plant

LONDON, June 9 (Reuters) - Rio Tinto Ltd/Plc has begun to restart some capacity at its Tiwai Point aluminium smelter in New Zealand, shut for repair late last year after equipment failure, a company spokesman said on Tuesday. "We've begun progressively restarting production, but we're not going to start up to full capacity at this point," he said. In early November, the company said output at Tiwai Point had been cut by the equivalent of about 8,500 tonnes per month or 100,000 tonnes per year (tpy) following the failure of an electrical transformer. Market conditions would determine when the pot line at the 350,000 tpy smelter, producing high purity aluminium for niche markets, would return to full capacity, the spokesman said. Production at the plant was also curbed from last May to conserve electricity, but improved power supplies allowed the company to restart that output from early October. Around 15 percent of the world's global aluminium smelting capacity lies idle because of the slump in demand from the key construction and transport industries. That figure was nearer 20 percent at one point, but a substantial amount of shuttered capacity in China has since been restarted. At 1304 GMT the London Metal Exchange (LME) three-months aluminium price was indicated at $1,637/47 a tonne, around its highest since early January.