Why is aluminium not extracted from its ore using carbon like iron is?
The bond between aluminium and oxygen is stronger than the bond between carbon and oxygen, which is stronger than the bond between iron and oxygen. That’s putting it in very informal language. Posh language would talk about free energies of formation, but that would come to the same thing really. Another way of putting it: carbon is not a strong enough reducing agent to reduce aluminium oxide to aluminium metal. As the other answer says, this needs to be done electrochemically.
