September 2024
Lithuania: Arturas Zaremba, the head of Akmenes Cementas, has warned that government proposals to increase the import tax on coal in 2024 and the abolition of subsidies for the fuel will affect the company. The country’s parliament is also proposing scaling the import tax based on a CO2 scale, according to the Baltic Business Daily newspaper. Zaremba said that the cement producer uses 130,000t/yr of coal. However, it is currently investing Euro22m on an upgrade to its Akmenes integrated plant to allow it to switch to using a higher proportion of solid-recovered fuel. It currently has a 10% alternative fuels substitution rate using dried sewage sludge and tyres.
Zaremba said "There will be some impact because we will still have some of that coal left, but not as much as we would have had without the investment. I have not followed how much they plan to increase the excise duty, but we need to look into how much that would be in the financial terms. Any increase has an impact."
Cuban plant supplying oil well cement products 21 April 2023
Cuba: Corporación Cementos Cubanos’ Siguaney plant is supplying oil well cement products for Empresa de Perforación y Reparación de Pozos de Petróleo y Gas (EMPERCAP) and Australia-based Melbana. It has contracts to supply around 300t to both companies for local projects, according to the Prensa Latina news agency. It is also supplying PP-25 and P-35 types of oil well cement to the government.
US: Holcim US has joined the Department of Energy's (DOE) 'Better Climate Challenge' to reduce CO2 emissions and save energy. It is the first cement producer to commit to the DOE program. The subsidiary of Switzerland-based Holcim plans to power the electrical operations at 13 cement plants in the country with 100% renewable energy by 2030 and to reach net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. As part of the 'Better Climate Challenge' it has committed to reduce CO2 emissions in the US by at least 25% by 2033.
Examples of current renewable power usage at Holcim US cement plants include the installation of three onsite wind turbines at the Paulding plant in Ohio that generate 11,500MWh while a forthcoming solar unit at the Hagerstown plant in Maryland will generate up to 18,440MWh. All 13 Holcim cement plants will conduct reviews to identify projects that could contribute to meeting goals of the challenge.
With grant support from the DOE, Holcim is also investigating the feasibility of using carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) at its cement plants in Portland, Colorado, and Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. In addition to involvement in the Better Climate Challenge, Holcim US is a continuing partner of the DOE's 'Better Plants Challenge', sharing facility-level energy data and solutions to help guide other industrial companies with implementing energy solutions in their facilities.
First Graphene consortium to start graphene-enhanced cement trial at Breedon Cement in June 2023 21 April 2023
UK: A consortium led by Australia-based First Graphene including Breedon Cement, Morgan Sindall Construction and the University of Manchester plans to start a trial producing graphene-enhanced cement in June 2023. The project will aim to produce around 2000t of the cement in the first instance. Its performance as a binder in mortar and concrete systems will be analysed to assess the performance improvement, prior to use in real-world demonstrations by Morgan Sindall Construction. Data from Breedon and First Graphene production sites has already been analysed by the University of Manchester and found graphene enhanced cement to both offset CO2 and demonstrate potential mechanical benefits, even at graphene loading levels less than 0.06%.The project is supported by a Euro215m grant from the Innovate UK scheme.
Michael Bell, the managing director and chief executive officer of First Graphene, said “Our research and development in collaboration with some of the world’s most innovative materials technology organisations, coupled with buy-in from industry partners to trial our graphene products, sets the foundation for a strong commercialisation pathway.” He added, “Greening of the concrete and cement sector provides our company with a great opportunity to strengthen both our revenue and ultimately profitability as market demand for decarbonisation technologies and materials increases.”
Italy: Buzzi Unicem reduced its specific gross scope 1 CO2 emissions by 4% year-on-year to 664kg/t cementitious product in 2022 from 689kg/t in 2021. As part of its Sustainability Report for 2022 it revealed that specific CO2 emissions varied from a low of 500kg/t in Luxembourg to a high of 812kg/t in Ukraine. Its specific thermal consumption fell slightly to 4084MJ/t clinker and its thermal substitution rate was 29.9%.
The company’s Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LITFR) was 4.9 and two fatalities were reported. It also noted that six employees – five Ukrainian and one Russian – died as a result of the war between Ukraine and Russia that started in February 2022. In addition, six staff were wounded, one taken prisoner and two were reported missing from its Ukrainian workforce.
The building materials producer noted that it had met some of its five-year sustainability targets set in 2017, including a 5% reduction in specific CO2 emissions, the implementation of structural engagement projects at all of its production sites with a high economic, environmental and social impact and the achievement of increasingly safe working conditions.
France: Ciments Calcia has announced an investment of Euro86m to further decarbonise cement production at its integrated Beaucaire plant. The subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials has allocated a total of Euro600m towards reducing CO2 emissions from all of its operations in the country in response to a government initiative, according to The Tribune newspaper.
The current funding follows a spend of just under Euro7m on upgrades at the site, including installing a new clinker cooler that will allow for greater recovery of waste heat, and the addition of a new computer control system. Following this work, the single production line plant was restarted in early April 2023.
The next stage of investment has started with a feasibility study. If successful, a tendering process could start in the second half of 2023 with work planned to start in 2025. The company intends to renovate the plant’s electricity network, modernise the production line with a preheater and a pre-crusher and make further changes to target an alternative fuels thermal substitution rate of 75%. A third stage, involving carbon capture and utilisation and/or storage, is tentatively planned to start in 2030.
Türkiye: Ahmet Eren, the chair of Eren Holding, says that its Medcem Çimento subsidiary will double its cement production capacity to 7Mt/yr in 2024. Eren made the comments in an interview amongst revealing investment plans, in other sectors, according to Bloomberg. Medcem Çimento selected Sintek Group to build a new 9000t/day production line at its integrated Mersin plant in late 2021. Germany-based Aumund was also reported in 2022 to be supplying equipment for the project.
India: UltraTech Cement has commissioned an upgrade to its grinding plant at Patliputra in Bihar. The 2.2Mt/yr upgrade brings the total capacity of the unit to 4.7Mt/yr. The cement producer will use the additional capacity to serve market demand in the east region of the country. It has a total national cement production capacity of 129Mt/yr.
India: Udaipur Cement Works has commissioned a 1MWp floating solar unit at its Dabok mine in Rajasthan. The project was supplied by Oriana Power, according to the Press Trust of India. Udaipur Cement Works is a subsidiary of JK Lakshmi Cement.
Anirudh Saraswat, the co-founder and chief business officer of Oriana Power, said "The state has vast untapped potential in terms of intense solar radiation, one of the highest numbers of sunny days in a year and availability of vast barren and uncultivable, unutilised government and private land. This has the potential to make Rajasthan a highly preferred destination for solar energy at the global level."
Oriana Power is an India-based solar energy products provider that finances, constructs and operates solar projects for industrial and commercial customers.
Building new buildings from old ones 19 April 2023
Holcim launched its formal take on construction and demolition waste (CDW) this week with the unveiling of its ECOCycle technology platform at the BAU architecture fair in Munich. This amounts to managing the distribution, processing, grinding and recycling of CDW back into new building material products. It claims that its concrete, cement and aggregate products can contain 10 - 100% of CDW with no drop in performance.
It is hard to gauge whether this is marketing for existing operations or the start of something new. Yet, in its 2022 Sustainability Report, Holcim said that it recycled 6.8Mt of CDW back into building products and that it is on track to meet its target of 10Mt by 2025. This target was neatly put into words as wanting “to build more new buildings from old ones.” Ahead of the announcement of the launch of ECOCycle, it added that it was going to roll out its Susteno product around Europe. This product, made from 20% CDW, was originally released in Switzerland in the late 2010s. Notably, recent acquisitions by Holcim that connect to its growing focus on CDW include Poland-based Ol-Trans in July 2022, UK-based Wiltshire Heavy Building Materials in October 2022 and UK-based Sivyer Logistics in April 2023.
As covered by Global Cement Weekly in February 2023, Holcim is not the only heavy building materials company pivoting to CDW. The European Union (EU) set a 70% recovery target for it in 2020 and various cement company sustainability reports have described the region as being receptive to moves into this sector. Cemex set up a global waste management subsidiary called Regenera at the end of January 2023. This division covers both alternative fuels, CDW and industrial by-products, so it is more general than Holcim’s current effort, but it shows intent in the same direction. Cemex previously set a target of recycling 14Mt/yr CDW by 2030.
Heidelberg Materials has been working on developing recycled concrete paste and its ReConcrete-360° concrete recycling process. As of its last sustainability report, this process had been tested at the pilot scale and is now being developed and scaled for industrial application. In addition to acquiring UK-based Mick George Group in December 2022 Heidelberg Materials has also purchased Germany-based RWG Holding in January 2023 and Germany-based SER Group in February 2023. All three companies operate in the CDW sector.
The other notable contribution that Heidelberg Materials has been making is as a partner of the ‘Circular City - Building Material Registry for the City of Heidelberg’ project. When Heidelberg Materials announced its involvement in the initiative in mid-2022 it said it was the first city in Europe to apply the principles of urban mining. The goal of the project is to take an inventory of the city’s buildings and then compile it in a digital material registry. The basis for the registry is the Urban Mining Screener developed by EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency). This programme can estimate the composition of buildings based on building data such as location, year of construction, building volume or building type. Circular economy supply chains can then act accordingly when a building is retrofitted, demolished or deconstructed. So, for example, at the start of the project it worked out that a former US Army housing estate conversion site was calculated to contain approximately 466,000t of material, with about half in the form of concrete, a fifth in the form of bricks and 5% as metal.
That last example compares to a European Commission estimate that, as a whole, Europe generates around 450 - 500Mt/yr of CDW. A third of this is concrete. As with alternative fuels and slag previously, this may be money going into the ground. Recycling building materials is not new but any significant increase in reusing CDW that can reduce the clinker factor of cement (and the cement factor of concrete) offers a potentially cheaper route to building materials decarbonisation than carbon capture and utilisation/storage at current costs. Hence the continued interest.