EGA Brand Guidelines: Dubai and Abu Dhabi Smelters Merged in 2013

A Dubai decree in 1975 and an Abu Dhabi smelter in 2007.

EGA, short for Emirates Global Aluminium, is the product of two older companies. The first, Dubai Aluminium, known as Dubal, was established by a decree signed in May 1975 by Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the company says. Its smelter at Jebel Ali started its first pot in November 1979. Gulf News, carrying a report by the state news agency WAM in November 2019, described the first metal from Jebel Ali that month in 1979 as the start of aluminium production in the UAE.

The second, Emirates Aluminium, or Emal, was founded in 2007 in Abu Dhabi. EGA’s timeline says its first phase was announced in February 2007, its first pot started in December 2009 and the first phase was fully commissioned in December 2010, at the Al Taweelah site in Abu Dhabi.

The two merged in 2013. Gulf News and English Wikipedia both date the merger to that year; EGA’s timeline says the formation of EGA was announced in June 2013. The company is owned by Mubadala Investment Company of Abu Dhabi and Investment Corporation of Dubai, sovereign wealth funds which English Wikipedia says hold 50 per cent each. EGA says it is the largest company jointly owned by the two emirates, employs more than 7,000 people and is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

From a smelter company to an integrated producer.

After the merger EGA moved upstream. Its timeline says it took full ownership of Guinea Alumina Corporation, a bauxite project in the Republic of Guinea, in May 2013; Guinea’s parliament ratified a revised project scope in 2014, and the first bauxite was exported in August 2019. In April 2019 EGA started the Al Taweelah alumina refinery, which it calls the first in the UAE. It also says it retrofitted older production lines with technology developed in the UAE, a project completed in 2017.

Guinea did not last. EGA says Guinea Alumina Corporation definitively ended all its activities in August 2025, following what EGA calls the illegal expropriation of its assets by the Republic of Guinea. EnterpriseAM reported in January 2026 that EGA had halted its Guinea operations in 2025 after a dispute with the government.

The company has since added recycling. EGA says construction of an aluminium recycling plant at Al Taweelah began in November 2023, and that it bought the German specialty foundry Leichtmetall Aluminium Giesserei Hannover in March 2024, a majority stake in the American recycler Spectro Alloys in September 2024, and a majority stake in the Italian recycler Eco Green in July 2026. Its operations page now lists smelters at Jebel Ali and Al Taweelah, the alumina refinery and recycling plant at Al Taweelah, and recycling or foundry plants in the United States, Germany and Italy.

EGA sells its metal under named product lines. Its website lists primary aluminium alongside CelestiAL, which it calls solar aluminium, RevivAL, recycled aluminium, and MinimAL, low-carbon aluminium. EGA says that in January 2021 it and the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority made the UAE the first country to produce aluminium using solar power. It describes itself as the world’s largest “premium aluminium” producer and gives its 2025 output as 2.84 million tonnes of metal; in 2019, the UAE’s economy minister was quoted by Gulf News as saying EGA made one in every 25 tonnes of aluminium worldwide.

How aluminium companies present themselves.

Aluminium companies sell a grey metal that most people never see in its raw form, so their imagery leans on the moments when it glows. The potline, a long hall of electrolytic cells, and the casthouse, where molten metal is poured into ingots, slabs and billets, are the scenes that recur in annual reports and recruitment pages: orange light, heat-resistant suits and stacked bars of silver metal.

Further down the chain, the pictures change to finished forms. Rolling mills show coils of sheet and foil; marketing pages turn to beverage cans, window frames, aircraft panels and car bodies, the places where buyers meet the metal. Producers also photograph the smelter itself from a distance, sometimes beside the dam, hydro station or power plant that feeds it, since smelting is done by electrolysis and runs on a steady supply of electricity.

Over the past decade, low-carbon metal has become a brand category of its own. Producers give named labels to aluminium made with hydropower or other low-emission electricity and publish carbon figures alongside them; Rusal markets metal under the ALLOW name and Alcoa uses its Sustana family, the companies say. Recycling programmes, scrap collection and remelting are presented in the same frame, and sustainability reports, with their landscapes, maps and charts, have become one of the main design documents these companies publish.

For a designer, the category is a study in contrast: heavy industry, huge sites and molten metal on one side, and on the other a clean, technical language of labels, figures and finished products used to present it to buyers and the public.

Al Taweelah, and a planned smelter in Oklahoma.

In 2026 the Al Taweelah complex was damaged. The National reported that the site was damaged on 28 March 2026; the company said the smelter and cast house, power plant, alumina refinery and recycling plant were fully evacuated and entered emergency shutdown, and on 12 April it declared force majeure for certain products. EGA has since been restarting the smelter’s 1,262 reduction cells one by one. The National reported in August 2026 that 315 had been restarted, that the refinery was running at about half its capacity, and that EGA was aiming for full production in the first quarter of 2027.

Abroad, EGA is planning a smelter in the United States. It first proposed an Oklahoma smelter in May 2025, Canary Media reported, and in January 2026 it and Century Aluminum announced a joint project at the Tulsa Port of Inola, with EGA holding 60 per cent and Century 40 per cent. At the time, the companies said construction was set to start by the end of 2026, and a long-term power contract was still being negotiated, according to Canary Media and EnterpriseAM.

The brand works in two languages. EGA’s website runs in English and Arabic, uses the short name EGA throughout, and frames the business in national terms: it calls its aluminium the biggest made-in-the-UAE export after oil and gas, and runs a “Make it in the Emirates” section about local industry. EGA says Al Taweelah was the first site in the Middle East certified to the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative’s performance standard, in May 2019, followed by Jebel Ali in 2021. It does not publish a set of brand colours or a corporate typeface.

For a design guide, EGA shows how a merged state-owned producer builds one name over two older ones and sells its metal through named product lines. Compare Century Aluminum, its partner in Oklahoma, and Alba, another Gulf smelter. For this guide we use a Gulf blue, a desert sand and a muted gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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