(Bloomberg) -- Alcoa Corp.’s chief executive officer said mounting losses at the aluminum producer’s Spain production complex leave few options other than shuttering the operation.

Alcoa’s San Ciprian facility, which is running at 50% capacity for alumina output and has a fully curtailed aluminum smelter, is incurring substantial losses, CEO William Oplinger said on a Wednesday call with analysts. He said it doesn’t make economic sense for the company to follow through on a phased restart of the aluminum plant this year as previously planned.

“If the situation does not change significantly in the months ahead, we anticipate that available funding will be exhausted in the second half of 2024,” Oplinger said. “If that happens, we will have no choice but to make hard decisions that will adversely and potentially irrevocably impact employment and the economy.”

Alcoa, the largest US aluminum producer, is working with government and employees to make San Ciprian viable, though there is limited cash to run the operation, Oplinger said. The company would need an agreement from labor unions to close the facility.

“The agreement that we have with the unions is to work towards a viability of those facilities,” Oplinger said Thursday in an interview. “There is a series of commitments that we’ve made and we are going to uphold those commitments; however, the entity has a limited amount of cash and at some point that cash runs out.”

The company has a legal agreement to restart 32 pots at San Ciprian’s smelter in the first quarter, though the CEO warns that restarting them will leave only $240 million in cash and available credit lines for the complex.

Oplinger wouldn’t speculate on what would happen if cash runs out, though he said during the analysts’ call that committing to the smelter restart would accelerate the cash drain. Such a scenario, he said, would be a situation where “everybody loses.”

(Updates with comments from CEO in phone interview in final three graphs.)

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