September 2024
Cementos Moctezuma completes second line at Apazapan plant 08 February 2017
Mexico: Cementos Moctezuma has completed its second production line at its Apazapan plant near Veracruz. The unit now has a cement production capacity of 2.75Mt/yr following an investment of over US$150m. Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, Constitutional Governor of Veracruz, Efraín González Flores, Municipal Constitutional President of the Municipality of Apazapan, Fabrizio Donegà, General Manager of Moctezuma Corporation and others attended a ceremony to mark the operational start-up of the new line in late January 2017. Following the expansion, the cement producer has a production capacity of 8Mt/yr in the country.
Bangladesh: PN Iyer has been appointed as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Thailand’s Siam City Cement’s operations in Bangladesh. Iyer has worked previously for ACC and Holcim. He holds qualifications with the Harvard Business School, the IMD Business School and the University of Calcutta.
Neeraj Akhoury appointed managing director of ACC 08 February 2017
India: Neeraj Akhoury has been appointed managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of ACC with effect from 4 February 2017. He joined the board of ACC in December 2016.
Akhoury has worked in the cement and steel industries for the last 24 years. Previously he was the CEO of Lafarge Surma Cement and the country representative for LafargeHolcim Bangladesh. He began his career with Tata Steel in 1993 and joined the LafargeHolcim Group in India in 1999. He was a member of the Executive Committee of Lafarge India, heading Corporate Affairs followed by Sales. In 2011, he moved to Nigeria as CEO and Managing Director of Lafarge AshakaCem. Subsequently he was appointed Strategy and Business Development Director for Middle East and Africa at the Lafarge headquarters in Paris, France.
Ron Wirahadiraksa and Hu Chao resign from Huaxin Cement 08 February 2017
China: Ron Wirahadiraksa and Hu Chao have resigned from Huaxin Cement. Wirahadiraksa has resigned as a director of the company citing other commitments. Chao has resigned as he has left the company. Both departures take immediate effect.
Wirahadiraksa, the current chief financial offer of LafargeHolcim, was proposed as a director of Huaxin Cement in September 2016. Huaxin Cement is an association company of LafargeHolcim. As of 31 December 2015, the group held 41.8 % of the voting rights in the associate company.
Cement sales fall by 10.7% in 2016 in Argentina 07 February 2017
Argentina: Sales of cement have fallen by 10.7% year-on-year in 2016, according to data from the National Statistics and Censuses Institute (INDEC). Overall, the domestic construction sector declined by 12.7% in 2016
New EU border tariffs will boost low-carbon cement 07 February 2017
Belgium: Environmental campaign group Sandbag says that research it has conducted has shown that proposed tariffs can protect European Union (EU) cement from ‘dirty’ competition and reward EU companies that produce low-carbon cement. It has released its data ahead of the a vote by the European Parliament in mid-February 2017 to decide on whether to adopt a new border adjustment mechanism (BAM) proposed by the Parliament’s Environment Committee.
The non-government organisation says that a BAM would require importers of cement and clinker into the EU to surrender emissions permits corresponding to the embedded carbon in their products, in the same way that domestic EU cement manufacturers are required to do at present. At the same time, cement, would no longer receive free allocation.
Previous research carried out by Sandbag suggests that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has driven cement emissions higher, whilst other European and national regulations and product standards discriminate against low-carbon cement companies. Over the last decade, the EU carbon market may have delivered more than Euro4.7bn in ‘windfall’ profits to cement companies. However, Sandbag say that border taxes could set cement producers on a level playing field by harmonising incentives to reduce product emissions within the EU.
“The EU can now implement a pragmatic and politically feasible solution for boosting low-carbon cement in Europe, and ending the scandal of enormous windfall profits to cement companies. However, this isn’t simply about cement. In a world of developing carbon markets with no unified set of rules, it is necessary to account for discrepancies in order to avoid offshoring of production,” said Wilf Lytton, an analyst at Sandbag.
Cembureau lobbies for revised European emissions trading scheme 07 February 2017
Belgium: Cembureau, the European cement association, has lobbied members of the European Parliament with its opinion that the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) must maintain free allowances at the level of best-performers in order to achieve real emission reductions whilst maintaining a competitive industry in Europe. It expressed its views ahead of a scheduled vote in the plenary session of the Parliament in February 2017. One of its key demands was that fairness should be a key principle of policy making and that jobs in one sector are just as important as those in other sectors.
Cembureau called for the proposal to amend the EU ETS to ensure that all energy-intensive industries are on the carbon leakage list and all installations receive a free allocation based on ‘ambitious but realistic’ benchmarks, and benefit from free allocation based on actual production. It wants a sufficient number of free allocations for energy intensive industries at risk of carbon leakage to be made available, hence the auction share should not be higher than 52%. It also wants no further burden to be imposed on EU-ETS sectors. The 43% reduction objective and the 2.2% linear reduction factor for phase IV should not be further increased. Lastly, it has asked for support for innovation focus on energy intensive industries with an extension to cover the whole range of low carbon technologies including industrial carbon capture and utilisation (CCU). The Innovation Fund should be fully financed from the auctioning share.
In response to an amendment made by the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety committee (ENVI) the cement association said that it did not believe that this proposal could work. Its main concerns were: that introducing such a mechanism with a consequential loss of free allowances could create legal uncertainty and hamper further investments by the cement sector in Europe; that it would be impossible to measure the CO2 performance of third country producers; an overall lack of clarity as to how such scheme would operate; serious concerns about World Trade Organisation (WTO) compatibility; that application to a few sectors would only lead to discrimination in the downstream market where cement competes with other building materials (steel, glass, wood, asphalt) that are not subject to such a scheme; and that the suggested scheme would lead to a competitive disadvantage for European cement producers on export markets where local cement players are not subject to similar CO2 constraints.
Cembureau also used the opportunity to highlight some of the research projects the local sector is undertaking to improve its environmental performance, reduce CO2 emissions and improve energy efficiency.
Malaysia: Engineering company Christian Pfeiffer has released more information about a grinding plant that it completed at the Mambong cement plant for Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS) in 2016. The engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contract was originally signed in mid-2014 and it also included raw material handling, finished product storage silos and an automated packing plant.
The grinding plant consists of a two-compartment ball mill with a diameter of 4.8m x 15m effective grinding length equipped with a QDK 248-Z separator designed to produce 150t/hr of cement with a fineness of 3500cm²/g according to Blaine. The mill is supported by slide shoe bearings and driven by a lateral drive unit consisting of a girth gear and two pinion gear box with a floating shaft and a 5600kW main motor. The feed materials - clinker, gypsum and limestone - are dosed separately via weigh feeders, while fly ash can be added directly to the separator by a bucket elevator.
The ball mill is equipped with progressive lifting and classifying liners and filled with Allmax grinding balls. The material flow from the first to the second compartment is regulated by a Christian Pfeiffer intermediate flow-control diaphragm in Monobloc design, to ensure an ideal material level and particle size for fine grinding in the second compartment. The fine ground cement leaves the mill by a discharge diaphragm, in a Christian Pfeiffer Monobloc design, and is fed to the separator circuit by a bucket elevator. Separation of the ground cement is achieved by a bag filter application with minimum remaining dust content in the clean gas of below 10 mg/Nm³.
The cement produced is stored in two interchangeable 10,000t silos. One is a mono-cell and the other duo-cell, allowing for the production and storage of three different types of cement. Each silo is equipped with two bulk loading devices for conventional silo truck loading. Cement for the adjacent packing plant is transported via air slides and a bucket elevator. There, it can be filled into big-bags or cement paper bags by a rotary packer at a rate of 3000 bags/hr. At this stage the single packed cement bags can either be directly loaded on trucks or be transferred to a palletiser. The automated palletising system is designed for both pallet and palletless operation.
CMS officially launched the 1Mt/yr grinding plant in late 2016.
India: A representative of Jaiprakash Associates’ bank ICICI has told local media that its sale of assets to UltraTech Cement should be concluded ‘soon.’ ICICI Bank's managing director and chief executive officer Chanda Kochhar made the comments to the CNBC TV18 television channel in an interview. He added that the transaction was moving well in terms of regulatory approval. The deal covers over 20Mt/yr of cement production assets that are being sold for a value of US$2.4bn.
PPC sales volumes rise in first nine months of 2016 07 February 2017
South Africa: PPC’s sales volumes have risen by 4% in South Africa and by 9% in Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Botswana collectively in the first nine months of 2016. The cement producer reported in a trading statement that its sales volumes in South Africa had risen overall but that its prices had fallen. It is planning price increases in selected regions in February 2017 in selected regions.
In Zimbabwe, the company saw a boost in cement sales following the commissioning of a mill in Msasa, Harare although it has faced liquidity challenges that made importing raw materials difficult. In Rwanda it has continued to ramp-up production and in Botswana sales have risen in the last quarter of 2016 due to sales promotions.
The cement producer also reported that the cement plant it is building in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was 95% complete in January 2017. Hot commissioning is due to start at the site in February 2017 and operational cement production anticipated to start in the second quarter of 2017. Operational cement production is also expected to start in the second quarter of 2017 at its project in Ethiopia. Finally, the company’s Slurry SK9 new kiln line in South Africa was reported as being 54% complete. Commissioning and ramp-up for the site is scheduled for the first half of 2018.