Displaying items by tag: US

US: Researchers from CalPortland have published a peer-reviewed study looking at the absorption or carbonation of CO₂ by buildings, pavements and structures made from concrete. The authors argue that this negative effect on CO₂ emissions is not being considered in global, national and regional greenhouse gas accounting methods. The paper calls for focused studies on CO₂ uptake in concrete within the context of its overall Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

“It is time to further examine the value of concrete in the built environment as a significant carbon sink,” said Allen Hamblen, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of CalPortland. “To do so accurately, we must specifically look at the net effects of CO₂ sequestration in concrete and evaluate all structures over their lifetime within a circular economy.”

The study looks at previous attempts to quantify the effect of concrete carbonation, notably using work by the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (SERI) that examined data from several European countries to develop practical models to gauge the extent of CO₂ uptake by concrete globally in the built environment. Different models estimated that 15 - 20% of CO₂ emissions from clinker production were reabsorbed over the lifetime of concrete structures.

US: Charah Solutions plans to open a grinding plant to make supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) from natural pozzolan at Oxnard in California. The unit will be accessible by truck and railway. It will sell pozzolan and other materials to concrete product manufacturers throughout south California.

The Oxnard plant will be operated in partnership with Diversified Minerals, a supplier and manufacturer of standard and custom blend cement and concrete products. It will receive natural pozzolan by truck and rail and then grind pozzolan marketed under the brand MultiPozz pozzolan. MultiPozz pozzolan will be distributed throughout Charah Solutions’ MultiSource materials network of more than 40 nationwide in the US with international sourcing and distribution.

“Fly ash is becoming more difficult to source in California, which is forcing the construction industry to look for viable alternatives. Natural pozzolan and other SCMs that meet ASTM specifications are generating very high interest. With Charah Solutions’ resources and DMI’s strategic partnership with the only active pozzolan mine in Southern California, we are both the closest and the first to bring these products to market,” said Jim Price, chief executive officer (CEO) of Diversified Minerals.

Colombia: Cemex Colombia has been accused by the news division of Caracol Televisión of allegedly making payments to the Juan Manuel Santos presidential campaign in 2014 in return for preferential treatment on construction contracts. Santos subsequently won the 2014 presidential election and served until 2018.

Sources, quoted by Noticias Caracol from a US police investigation into the company, say that it paid US$1m in cash and contributed cement to local candidates. They say that the local candidates then sold the donated cement at a discount for additional campaign funds. The Office of the Attorney General of Colombia is also investigating the matter. The report by Noticias Caracol follows an expose by Semana magazine.

US: ABB has launched its Dodge Safety Mount spherical roller bearings product with a built-in patented locking mechanism. It says that this new feature can reduce installation time by up to 75% compared to traditional products. It is mounted by tightening fasteners, instead of using a hammer and other tools. The new system also allows for simple installation and removal from the same side of the bearing. The new bearing is intended for bulk material and air handling applications.

Safety Mount bearings feature a triple-lip contact seal and corrosion-resistant flinger sealing system, which prevents contamination from entering the product during installation and operation. A labyrinth seal option is available for high-speed and high-temperature applications. The product can also be used with ABB Ability Smart Sensor.

Argentina: Loma Negra is challenging a proposed US-based court case on behalf of US-based shareholders. The legal challenge alleges that the cement producer misled investors by misrepresenting its exposure to a corruption scandal and downplayed the potential impact of the economic crisis in 2018, according to the Ámbito Financiero newspaper. Loma Negra says that it was never involved in any bidding process related to the corruption case relating to its Brazilian owner Camargo Correa. The US lawsuit is also taking legal action against the banks involved with Loma Negra’s initial public offering (IPO) in late 2017.

US: Cemex has announced that it is supplying concrete, including a specialised self-consolidating mix, along with thousands of tonnes of aggregates for the replacement of the Sixth Street Viaduct Bridge in Los Angeles, California. The original 915m-long bridge, which has served as a backdrop in numerous films, was built in 1932 and is in need of replacement.

Cemex will supply 34,400m3 of ready-mix concrete. This will include 4800m³ of Evolution, Cemex’s range of self-consolidating concrete product that, in this instance, was tailored to fit the bridge’s design and the requirements of the client, CalTrans. Cemex will also supply a fibre-reinforced concrete solution for the bridge deck and structure itself. The US$482m structure, funded by a mixture of state and Federal funds, is expected to open in late 2020.

US: Colombia’s Grupo Argos is in talks with US-based Summit Materials about a potential merger. Sources quoted by Reuters said that the Colombian company would like to combine Cementos Argos with Summit Materials to gain economies of scale.

Summit Materials owns Continental Cement, a cement producer that runs two integrated cement plants at Hannibal, Missouri and Davenport, Iowa. It operates cement terminals at Minneapolis in Minnesota, St Paul in Minnesota, LaCrosse in Wisconsin, Bettendorf in Iowa, West Des Moines in Iowa, St Louis in Missouri, Memphis in Tennessee, Convent in Louisiana and New Orleans in Louisiana. Summit Materials also owns a number of building material companies in the aggregates, ready-mixed concrete and asphalt industries.

US: Trabits Group and Brookhaven National Laboratory have been selected to present joint research papers at two scientific geothermal forums on the self-repair ability of the FlexCem Lightweight Variable Density well cement product. The first presentation will be at the September 2019 meeting of the Geothermal Resources Council (GRC), which will be held in Palm Springs, California, US. The second presentation will be at the World Geothermal Congress (WGC), which will be held in Reykjavik, Iceland in April 2020.

FlexCem well cement was developed by Trabits Group following completion of a research grant from the Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO). It is a composite cement using Type I/II cement clinker and Ferrierite zeolite, interground in proprietary ratios.

There was a glimmer of good news visible through the Delhi smog this week with the launch of a market-based emissions trading scheme (ETS) for particulate matter (PM). A pilot has started at Surat in Gujarat. The scheme will apply to 350 industries in the locality and it will be scrutinised for wider rollout in the country.

China robustly started to tackle its industrial PM emitters a few years ago although the work remains on-going. In its wake India has increasingly made the wrong sort of headlines with horrifically high dust emissions. Delhi, for example, reportedly had PM2.5 emissions of over 440µg/m³ in January 2019. To give this some context, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) annual upper guideline figure for safe human exposure is 10µg/m³. Research by the Financial Times newspaper suggested that more than 40% of the Indian population is subject to annual PM2.5 emissions of over 50µg/m³.

Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) research reckons that if India were able to meet its national PM2.5 standard of 40µg/m³ then its population would live 1.8 years longer or 4.3 years longer if it met the WHO guideline level. The current situation is an unnecessary tragedy. In strictly structural terms the country’s productivity is being thrown away by damaging the health of its workforce. For comparison amongst other major cement producing countries, AQLI data placed China’s PM2.5 emissions at 39µg/m³, Indonesia at 22µg/m³, Vietnam at 20µg/m³ the US at 9µg/m³. These figures cover all industries in different conditions and climates. If the US can do it, why not the others?

Back on trading schemes, the famous ETS at the moment is the European one for CO₂ emissions. Similar schemes are slowly appearing around the world as governments look at what the European Union (EU) did right and wrong. For example, South Africa started up a carbon tax in early June 2019. Yet as the supporting documents by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) point out there have been a variety of ETS systems’ over the years. The US’s Acid Rain Program is generally seen to have achieved significant reductions in SO2 and NOx emissions although the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) has continued this work. Chile even ran its own PM ETS in the 1990s although the outcomes have been disputed.

One problem with a CO₂ ETS, and anthropomorphic or man-made climate change in general, is that it is intangible. Even if sea levels deluge major coastal cities, rising mean temperatures reduce agricultural yields and human populations contract sharply, people will still be arguing over the research and the causes. The beauty of a PM ETS is that if it works you can literally see and feel the results. A famous example here is the UK’s Clean Air Act in the 1950s that banished the fog/smog that London used to be famous for.

The Gujarat PM ETS is a pilot, the results of which will be considered by researchers from a number of US-based universities and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Explicitly, the study plans to use a randomised control trial to compares its results against the command and control style approach used in the rest of the country. On the cement-side various Indian news stories have emerged as state pollution boards have increasingly started fining producers for emission limit breaches. Clearly the government is taking dust emissions seriously. Reduction is long overdue.

US: A fire broke out in the preheater tower at Buzzi Unicem’s Stockertown cement plant in Pennsylvania on 7 June 2019. No staff injuries were reported at the plant, although a fireman required medical treatment, according to the Express-Times newspaper. Fire crews were on the site for around two hours.