Displaying items by tag: Research
Progressive Planet Solutions develops new supplementary cementitious material from diatomaceous earth
10 June 2022Canada: Progressive Planet Solutions has successfully produced a new supplementary cementitious material (SCM) called PozDE from diatomaceous earth. The company says that it developed PozDE using calcium bentonite-containing diatomaceous earth from the Red Lake mine in Kamloops, British Colombia. The SCM’s seven-day and 28-day strength activity index (SAI) values are 101% and 120% those of ordinary Portland cement (OPC) respectively, while its water demand is lower at 98%.
Chief operating officer Ian Grant said “It is uncommon to see SCMs exceed the 7-day strength of the control Portland, so we are excited to see better strength while indicating lower water demand."
India: UltraTech Cement has entered into a collaboration with Finland-based Coolbrook to implement the latter’s roto dynamic heater (RDH) electric kiln technology in Indian cement plants. RDH technology uses renewable power to heat kilns to up to 1700°C.
UltraTech Cement managing director Kailash Jhanwar said “UltraTech is a forerunner in utilising renewable energy in its manufacturing operations. We are constantly looking at opportunities to improve process efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operations.” Jhanwar concluded “We believe that our collaboration with Coolbrook will help to further accelerate the decarbonisation of our operations.”
Coolbrook executive chair Ilpo Kuokkanen said “India is one of the most important potential markets for Coolbrook, as we want to make a global impact on CO2 emission reductions. Cooperation with India’s largest cement producer UltraTech is a significant step in our strategy to decarbonise heavy industry processes globally. UltraTech is also an excellent addition to our comprehensive and responsive partnership ecosystem spanning across leading industrial actors, academic institutions, and the public sector.”
UK: The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has granted Carbon Clean Euro701,000 under its Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) Innovation 2.0 programme. Carbon Clean says that it will partner with energy engineering company Doosan Babcock and Newcastle University to develop carbon capture systems which apply non-aqueous solvent (NAS) and rotating packed bed (RPB) technology together for the first time. The partners seek to overcome the challenges of scale and cost in order to advance the widespread deployment of CCUS systems.
The CCUS Innovation 2.0 programme is part of the UK government’s Euro1.17bn Net Zero Innovation Portfolio scheme.
US: The US Department of Energy has granted Solidia Technologies US$2.1m in funding for the development and testing of carbonation methods for its Solidia Cement. Solidia will research synthetic supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) production methods using direct CO2 capture and utilisation.
CEO Russell Hill said “We are proud to partner with the US Department of Energy to continue innovating and ultimately deliver on our mission to provide commercially viable decarbonisation technologies and sustainable solutions for the global construction and building materials industries. The funding will advance our carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies and synthetic SCMs that can be easily integrated into Portland cement-based concrete formulations, offering manufacturers a solution that is sustainable environmentally and economically.”
Mexico: Cemex and Coolbrook have signed a memorandum of understanding to test technology to electrify the cement kiln heating process. Coolbrook says that its Roto Dynamic Heater (RDH) technology can heat a cement kiln to 1700°C using electrical power. If generated from renewable sources this could potentially remove around 45% of the carbon emissions in cement production that normally arise from the use of fossil fuels. The companies expect the technology to be ready for commercial use at an industrial scale in 2024. They will jointly evaluate the best production site to test and develop this technology.
Ilpo Kuokkanen, the executive chair of Coolbrook, said "Coolbrook has set a target to build a comprehensive ecosystem around its revolutionary technology and to test its use in as many industrial processes as fast as possible. Together with Cemex, we can bring the technology to cement production and achieve significant emission reductions in one of the most energy and CO2-intensive industrial processes.”
Finland-based Coolbrook is a technology and engineering company that is developing processes to replace the burning of fossil fuels in major industrial sectors. Its RDH has potential applications in cement, steel and chemical production process. Its Roto Dynamic Reactor (RDR) is intended to eliminate CO2 emissions from the steam cracking process used in the production of plastic.
UK: A team of researchers from six UK universities has filed a patent for a clinkerless cement product called Cambridge Electric Cement. Local press has reported that the project, called UK Fires, saw researchers successfully produce the cement using renewable power from recycled cement powder and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS). Following its successes, UK Fires has obtained a further Euro2m in funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to continue its work into the range of concrete wastes suitable for use in Cambridge Electric Cement production.
India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Denmark-based FLSmidth to collaborate in the research and development of sustainable solutions for cement manufacturing. The agreement has been arranged under the ‘Green Strategic Partnership’ initiatives between Denmark and India that cover energy and climate change.
Under the MOU both companies will cooperate on a range of areas such as substituting conventional energy supplies with renewable sources and working towards CO2 emissions abatement. Both companies have committed to contributing research and development towards eventually building an industrial scale production plant where the new concepts can be further tested.
Mahendra Singhi, the managing director and chief executive officer of Dalmia Cement (Bharat) said, “In alignment with the ambitious net zero vision of our Prime Minister Narendra Modiji and given the strength and stature of our respective organisations, this association will provide futuristic solutions to the cement and concrete industry to emerge clean and green.” He added that India and Dalmia Cement in particular were keen to develop a roadmap for the implementation of Industry 4.0 with totally decarbonised cement plants and a ‘lighthouse’ cement plant.
Cement shortages in the southern US
27 April 2022Cement shortages were being reported in the US media last week in Alabama and South Carolina. The owner of a ready-mixed concrete supplier in South Carolina was blaming it on labour and supply shortages. Dan Crosby, the president of Metrocon, told Fox News that his business could only take on 60% of the work it could normally cope with due to the issue despite demand for construction growing in the state. Meanwhile, the Alabama Concrete Industries Association said that its home state saw a 14% increase in the demand for concrete in 2021 but that a cement shortage might cause delays to projects. The association also pointed the blame at labour and supply issues. It pointed out that high demand for concrete during the winter prevented inventory being built up and then the annual cement plant maintenance breaks in the spring added to the problems. Once contractors actually secured supplies of cement they then faced further delays due to a nationwide truck driver shortage!
Graph 1: Annual rolling cement shipments in the South of the US. Source: USGS.
Data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) doesn’t especially shed light on the situation in Alabama and South Carolina. Alabama was the fifth largest cement producing state in the country in January 2022 but this is unsurprising as it’s the state with the fifth largest cement production capacity. Rolling annual data on Portland and blended cement shipments by origin show the effects of the coronavirus outbreak in the south from the start of 2020 to January 2022. Shipments took a dive in 2020 and then mostly recovered in 2021. However, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee saw shipments rise from 7.1Mt pre-pandemic to 7.6Mt in January 2022. South Carolina’s shipments grew from 3Mt to 3.2Mt. Regionally, the North East had a similar pattern although, unlike the South, shipments have surpassed those at the start of 2020. The Midwest and West were different with a general upwards trend over the two years, although the West softened slightly from mid-2021 onwards. Overall the US as a whole has seen its shipments grow throughout this period.
Ed Sullivan from the Portland Cement Association (PCA) told the May 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine that the US cement sector did well in 2021 with a 4.1% year-on-year rise in sales to 104Mt. However, he flagged up supply chain problems that actually slowed growth, led by a lack of staff.
The other point along these lines that Sullivan made was that imports of cement might not necessarily be able to compensate for domestic supply issues due to global demand for shipping post-coronavirus. USGS data placed imports to the US at 13.7Mt in 2019 compared to 16.3Mt in 2021. Notably, Cemex restarted one production line in 2021 at its CPN cement plant in Sonora State in Mexico to export cement to the west of the US. In March 2022 it added that it was going to restart another line at the plant also. It’s not alone though as GCC reported in January 2022 that a line at one of its plants in Chihuahua, Mexico, was exporting cement to Texas. Sullivan reckoned that January 2022 was ‘weak’ but that it was followed by an ‘extremely strong’ February 2022. The first quarter results from Holcim and CRH seem to back this up with the former describing the period as ‘outstanding’ and the region leading its sales and earnings growth rate globally. CRH reported strong demand in central and southern regions.
As the US economy restarted following the peak of the early coronavirus waves in 2020, various supply chain issues have manifested. Staff shortages are one issue and this can also worsen other logistic problems. The south seems particularly vulnerable to all of this as it is both the country’s largest cement market and because demand has held up. In January 2022 research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified several reasons for staff shortages in the US and the UK. These included increased inactivity among older workers, the so called ‘She-cession’ (where female employment has overly reduced due to coronavirus trends) and shifting worker preferences amid strong labour demand.
Staff shortages are expected to sort themselves out throughout 2022 but favourable forecast demand for cement in the US is balanced by inflationary pressure. Persistent low staffing levels could further add to inflation growth. The US cement sector may be doing well at the moment but even success carries risks.
Global Cement’s Robert McCaffrey will be giving a keynote presentation at the IEEE-PCA Cement Conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday 3 May 2022. The May 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine, including interviews with PCA chief executive officer Mike Ireland and chief economist Ed Sullivan, is available to download now.
Germany: ThyssenKrupp Uhde, Holcim and the Technische Universität Berlin have started a joint project to investigate the use of a novel amine scrubbing technology for carbon capture. The goal is to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from existing cement plants and at the same time utilise the captured CO2 for other applications. This includes the development of new mass transfer process equipment that is more efficient and resilient to contaminations. The project is being funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.
The equipment is being tested using exhaust gas at Holcim’s Beckum plant. Various possibilities for using the captured CO2 are also being examined, such as manufacturing methanol or sustainable fuels. The aim is develop a technology that can be retrofitted at existing cement plants.
Ralph Kleinschmidt, head of technology, innovation and sustainability at ThyssenKrupp Uhde said, "Amine scrubbing is already commonly used to recover CO2 from process gases or exhaust gases. Now, we are developing the technology further and optimising it for the cement industry. Additional applications for capturing CO2 direct at source, such as in waste incineration plants, are also possible."Arne Stecher, head of decarbonisation at Holcim Germany added that the company is testing different processes to find the best carbon capture technology.
From the Nordics to the Mediterranean, European countries lead the field in reduced-clinker cement production using supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). While consumers, faced with ever-greater choice, continue to opt for sustainability, projects to improve existing SCMs and develop new ones have won government backing and have become a matter of serious investment for other heavy industries beside cement. European cement producers’ decisions are steering the course to a world beyond CEM I. Yet, even in Europe, great untapped potential remains.
Companies generated a good deal of marketing buzz around their latest reduced-CO2 cement ranges in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022: Buzzi Unicem’s CGreen in Germany and Italy, Holcim’s EcoPlanet in six markets from Romania to Spain, Cementir Holding’s Futurecem in Denmark and Benelux, and Cemex’s Vertua in Spain and several other countries. All boast reduced clinker factors through the use of alternative raw materials. This, however, is really a rebranding of a long-established norm in Europe.
Since 2010, cements other than CEM I have constituted over 75% of average annual cement deliveries across Cembureau member countries (all cement-producing EU member states, plus Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and Ukraine). This statistic breaks down differently from country to country. CEM II is the norm in Austria, Finland, Portugal and Switzerland, with deliveries in the region of 90%. Portland limestone cement (PLC) makes up a majority of deliveries in all four. It has been central to Switzerland’s transition to 89% (3.72Mt) of CEM II deliveries out of a total 4.18Mt of cement despatched in 2021. There, the main types of cement were CEM II/B-M (T-LL) Portland composite cement, with 1.38Mt (33%), and two different classifications of PLC: CEM II/A-LL PLC, with 1.28Mt (31%), and CEM II/B-LL PLC, with 888,000t (21%).
A second approach is that of the Netherlands, where CEM III blast furnace slag cement with a clinker factor below 65% predominates, favoured for its sulphate resistance and the protection it offers against chloride-initiated corrosion of steel reinforcement in marine settings. By contrast, the UK has traditionally maintained a higher reliance on CEM I cement. This can be partly explained by the preference of builders there for adding fly ash or ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) at the mixing stage. Nonetheless, CEM II Portland fly ash cement held a 14% (1.43Mt) market share in the UK’s 10.2Mt of cement consumption in 2021.
The UK Mineral Products Association (MPA) has identified limestone as an underutilised resource in the country’s cement production. Together with HeidelbergCement subsidiary Hanson Cement, it has applied for a change to National Application standards to allow the production of Portland composite cement from fly ash and limestone or GGBFS and limestone. The association has forecast that Portland composite cement could easily rise to 30 – 40% of UK cement consumption, and that this has the potential to eliminate 8% of the sector’s 7.8Mt/yr-worth of CO2 emissions.
Metallurgical waste streams have long flowed into European cement production, primarily as GGBFS, but also as bauxite residue. In 2021, alumina production in the EU alone generated 7Mt of bauxite residue, of which the bloc recycled just 100,000t (1.4%) that year. Two projects – the Holcim Innovation Center-led ReActiv project and Titan Cement and others’ REDMUD project – aim to produce new alternative cementitious materials from bauxite residue.
By collaborating with other industries, cement producers’ investments can most effectively reduce the overall cost of using these materials in cement production. In Germany, HeidelbergCement and ThyssenKrupp’s Save CO2 project aims to develop new improved latent hydraulic binders or alternative pozzolan from GGBFS by producing slag from directly reduced iron (DRI). The Save CO2 team believes that GGBFS substitution for clinker has the capacity to eliminite 200Mt/yr of CO2 emissions from global cement production.
Meanwhile in the world of mining, ThyssenKrupp and others’ NEMO project is investigating the recovery of a useable mineral fraction for cement production from the extractive waste of the Luikonlahti and Sotkamo mines in Finland and the Tara mine in Ireland, through bioleaching and cleaned mineral residue upcycling. This may give cement producers full access to Europe’s 28Bnt stockpiles of sulphidic mining waste, of which mines generate an additional 600Mt each year.
Denmark-based CemGreen, which produces the calcined clay supplementary cementitious material CemShale, is developing a shale granule heat-treating technology called CemTower. This consists of three pieces of equipment vertically integrated into cement plants’ preheaters, kilns and coolers, and brings the processing of waste materials – here oil shale – to the cement plant.
Lastly, cement producers are exploring the possible uses of waste made of cement itself. In Wallonia, HeidelbergCement subsidiary CBR’s CosmoCem project is investigating the production of alternative cement additives from large available flows of local demolition, soil remediation and industrial waste. Similarly, the Greece-based C2inCO2 project seeks to mineralise fines from concrete recycling for HeidelbergCement to use in the production of novel cements in its Greek operations.
In Switzerland, ZND Portland composite cement (produced using fine mixed granulate from building demolitions) is the third largest cement type, with 178,000t (4.3%) of total deliveries – narrowly behind CEM I with 239,000t (5.7%).Holcim Schweiz developed its Susteno 4 ZND Portland composite cement with Switzerland’s lack of any ash or slag supply in mind, demonstrating the potential flexibility of a circular economic approach to cement production.
On 21 March 2022, the University of Trier reported that it is in the process of mapping mineral resources, waste deposits and usable residues ‘on a cross-border scale,’ in an effort to produce new materials for use in cement production. Industry participants include France-based Vicat, CBR, Buzzi Unicem subsidiary Cimalux and CRH subsidiary Eqiom. Vicat is preparing a kiln at its 1Mt/yr Xeuilley cement plant in Meurthe-et-Moselle to use in testing new alternative raw materials developed under the project.
For Cembureau and its members, work continues, with the goal of Net Zero by 2050 constantly in sight. This goal includes a reduction in members’ clinker-to-cement ratios to well below 65%. In this, the association and its members are working towards a world not just beyond CEM I, but beyond CEM II, too. What exactly this will mean remains to be seen.
Sources
CemSuisse, ‘Lieferstatistik,’ 11 January 2022, https://www.cemsuisse.ch/app/uploads/2022/01/Lieferstatistik-4.-Quartal-2021.pdf
WSA, ‘December 2021 crude steel production and 2021 global crude steel production totals,’ 25 January 2022, https://worldsteel.org/media-centre/press-releases/2022/december-2021-crude-steel-production-and-2021-global-totals/
MPA, ‘Low carbon multi-component cements for UK concrete applications,’ July 2018, https://prod-drupal-files.storage.googleapis.com/documents/resource/public/Low%20carbon%20multi-component%20cements%20for%20UK%20concrete%20applications%20PDF.pdf
European Commission, ‘European Training Network for Zero-waste Valorisation of Bauxite Residue (Red Mud),’ 16 July 2020, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/636876
European Commission, ‘Industrial Residue Activation for sustainable cement production,’ 16 February 2022, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/958208
Recycling Portal, Zement der Zukunft – Forschungsprojekt „SAVE CO2“ gestartet, 28 May 2021, https://recyclingportal.eu/Archive/65677
h2020-NEMO, ‘Project,’ https://h2020-nemo.eu/project-2/
European Commission, ‘Green cement of the future: CemShale + CemTower,’ 14 April 2021, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101009382
CosmoCem, ‘Communiqué de Presse,’ https://cosmocem.org/
CO2 Win, ‘C²inCO2: Calcium Carbonation for industrial use of CO2,’ https://co2-utilization.net/en/projects/co2-mineralization/c2inco2/
Les Echos, ‘Rendre le ciment moins gourmand en CO2,’ 21 March 2022, https://www.lesechos.fr/pme-regions/innovateurs/des-substituts-au-clinker-rendent-le-ciment-moins-gourmand-en-co2-1395002