CHICAGO - Rio Tinto Alcan is planning routine maintenance outages at two of its aluminum smelters in Quebec, a company spokesman confirmed March 7.

The Montreal-based aluminum producer, a division of London-based Rio Tinto Plc, has slated an outage at its Shawinigan facility in March and an outage in April at its Arvida site, the spokesman said.

“Our customers have been informed, and they will not be impacted,” the spokesman said in an e-mail to AMM.

The precise dates of the outages were not immediately available.

One market source said the shutdowns would likely last for only a matter of days and agreed that they had been anticipated. “It’s like doing an oil change on your car,” he said.

The Shawinigan smelter has annual capacity of 100,000 tonnes and the Arvida smelter capacity has a capacity of 176,000 tonnes, the spokesman said. Arvida took a similar outage in February, he noted.