But, if the engineering and financial cost of "fixing" transport is higher than the cost of simply moving the bauxite processing plant to the bauxite instead of moving the bauxite to the plant...

Murphys Law is someone will put an aluminum smelter pot on a nuclear powered ship, during a storm the molten cryolite will slosh out of the pot freezing onto one side of the ship, sinking the ship, and we're right back to where we started.