From my understanding, the smelter recipes are based on the HU cost of heating up the material from room temperature to its melting point, and the dryer recipes are standardized based on the amount of distilled water produced. For Al(OH)3 though, the dryer recipe (~20k HU per dust) is over 20x more expensive than the smelter recipe for melting it (880 HU). This might make sense from a balance perspective, since you get smelters later than dryers, and dryers are easier to automate than a crucible, but isn’t it weird for the more realistic process to be so much more expensive?
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Yeah it is because you get the distilled Water out of it. And the Smelter Recipe DOES sound a bit low though, but it still makes sense for a light material, and it is autogenerated so it must be right. XD
Sometimes Recipes just exist to give you options, the options dont have to be good. 
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However each Unit of Hematite can provide 0.4 Unit of Iron, In real world 1kg of it should provide 0.72kg of Iron…
Since Iron have large usage and needed a lot, it do seems a bit inefficient
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That is why there is an Ore Multiplier on it, to counteract the Chemical Reaction Outputs.
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