Displaying items by tag: CO2

India: The government has notified the Greenhouse Gases Emission Intensity Target Rules, 2025, establishing legally binding reduction targets for 282 industrial units in cement and other heavy industries. The notification was issued by the Ministry of Environment on 8 October 2025 after considering all suggestions and objections received on the draft rules, which were published on 16 April 2025. Facilities must reduce greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of output from 2023–24 baseline levels during the 2025–26 to 2026–27 compliance period.

The rules implement the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022, which supports the creation of a domestic carbon market. Plants emitting below the target will earn tradable credits; those exceeding limits must buy credits or pay a penalty equal to twice the average credit price. The average price will be determined by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE). The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) will impose and oversee recovery of penalties, which must be paid within 90 days. Major cement producers including UltraTech, Dalmia, JK Cement, Shree Cement and ACC are included, with reduction targets of up to 3.4% over two years. The framework supports India’s Paris Agreement commitments and prepares exporters for mechanisms such as the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

Saudi Arabia: Northern Region Cement Company (NRCC) has announced the signing of a contract for the construction of a US$8.7m, 20MW solar power plant in Turaif City. The plant will be supplied by Sinoma Overseas Development. The company says that the contract is in line with Saudi Vision 2030 and the company’s strategy to increase the use of renewable energy. Construction will take place over 10 months, with operations expected to begin in late 2026.

Sinoma Overseas Development will carry out the full scope of engineering design, procurement, supply and delivery during the contract duration time, in addition to civil construction, installation and commissioning.

Norway: TotalEnergies, Equinor and Shell have announced that the first CO₂ volumes were transported by ship from Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik cement plant to Northern Lights’ Øygarden facilities. They were then injected 2600m under the seabed, 100km off the coast of western Norway. Phase one of the project has a storage capacity of 1.5Mt/yr. A second phase, approved in March 2025, will expand capacity to more than 5Mt/yr from 2028.

TotalEnergies’ senior vice president of carbon neutrality Arnaud Le Foll said “With the start of operations of Northern Lights, we are entering a new phase for the CCS industry in Europe. This industry now moves to reality, offering hard-to-abate sectors a credible and tangible way to reduce CO₂ emissions.”

US: A research team led by the University of Michigan’s Charles McCrory, in collaboration with the University of California, Davis (UCD) and the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a process to capture CO₂ and convert it into metal oxalates for use in cement production. The method uses electrodes to transform carbon dioxide into oxalate, which binds with metal ions and precipitates as a solid suitable for alternative cement. The researchers reduced the required lead catalyst to parts per billion by modifying the polymer environment around the catalyst, mitigating environmental risks. The researchers next want to focus on scaling up the process and are working on electrolysis on a large scale.

UCD associate professor Jesús Velázquez said “Metal oxalates represent an underexplored frontier – serving as alternative cementitious materials, synthesis precursors and even carbon dioxide storage solutions.”

US: Ozinga has broken ground on a 1Mt/yr alternative cement grinding plant in East Chicago, Indiana. The plant is equipped with a Gebr. Pfeiffer MVR5300-C6 vertical roller mill. It will produce ASTM C989-compliant slag cement and other blended cements. When operational in 2026, it will be the largest of its kind in North America, and avoid 700,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions from conventional cement production. Its location offers strategic rail, road and shipping access to large markets in the US and Canada.

East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland welcomed an anticipated 150 new jobs resulting from construction and subsequent operations at the plant.

India: During the fourth quarter of the 2025 financial year (which ended on 31 March 2025), premium products constituted 16% of Shree Cement’s sales mix, up from 12% one year previously. During the period, the company further diversified its offering with the launch of two new premium cements, Bangur Marble Portland slag cement and Extra White Portland slag cement, in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Both products are designed for maximum brightness and smoothness within their category of CEM-II Portland slag cements. The company says that its growing portfolio helped it to increase its full-year financial realisation per tonne by 5% year-on-year.

Business Today News has reported that managing director Neeraj Akhoury said "In the 2025 financial year, 74% of our cement output was blended, avoiding over 7.2Mt of CO₂ emissions."

Shree Cement crossed 60% consumption of energy from renewable sources in May 2025, Construction World News has reported. It has 582MW of installed renewable power capacity and is currently in the process of building a 1MW battery storage system at one of its cement plants in India.

Australia: Minister for Climate Change and Minister Chris Bowen says that the government is ‘considering’ the enactment of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent carbon leakage from high emissions-intensity products, including cement.

The Australian Parliament committed to 43% national CO₂ emissions reduction between 2005 and 2030 in 2022, and capped emitters’ individual carbon footprints in 2023. Final advice from a government Carbon Leakage Review was due after May 2025, and was possibly complicated by on-going US climate and trade reforms under President Trump. The Australian Cement Industry Federation bemoaned a lack of action on carbon leakage in March 2025. It warned of jeopardy to both decarbonisation and 1400 jobs in the Australian cement sector.

Australia’s construction industry imported 40% of its cement used in 2024.

Demand for heavy building materials in the UK dropped in the first quarter of 2025, with ready-mix concrete sales reaching a new 60-year low.¹ In an update last week, the UK’s Mineral Products Association (MPA) attributed the decline to existing economic headwinds, compounded by global trade disruptions, reduced investor confidence and renewed inflationary pressures.

Major infrastructure projects – including the HS2 high-speed railway in the English Midlands, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset and the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk – failed to offset delays and cancellations by cash-strapped local councils to roadwork projects. Residential construction, meanwhile, is ‘slowly but steadily’ recovering from historical lows, amid continuing high mortgage rates since late 2024.

The most interesting part of the MPA’s market appraisal was its warning of ‘new risks emerging in the global economy.’ These concern the new tariffs raised by the US against its import partners. The possible consequences, the MPA says, imperil the UK’s supply chains, construction sector and growth.

Of particular immediacy is the threat of imports into the UK from countries that previously focussed on the US market. The MPA said that the industry ‘cannot compete’ against increased low-cost, CO₂-intensive imports. It named Türkiye, which sends around 6.9Mt/yr of cement and clinker to the US, as a key threat. Türkiye became subject to the blanket 10% ‘baseline’ tariff on 2 April 2025.

The MPA probably didn’t have a particular company in mind when it said this. However, it bears noting that Turkish interests gained a share of UK cement capacity in October 2024, when Çimsa acquired 95% of Northern Ireland-based Mannok. Besides the Derrylin cement plant (situated on the border between Fermanagh, UK, and Cavan, Ireland), Mannok operates the Rochester cement storage and distribution facility in Kent, 50km from London. The facility currently supplies cement from Derrylin to Southern England and the Midlands. It could easily serve as a base of operations for processing and distributing imported cement and clinker from further afield.

Meanwhile in South West England, Portugal-based Cimpor is building a €20 – 25m cement import terminal in the Port of Bristol. The company is subject to 20% tariffs on shipments to the US from its home country. Its parent company, Taiwan Cement Corporation, is subject to 32% US tariffs from Taiwan.

But the plot thickens… On 8 May 2025, the UK became the first country to conclude a trade agreement with the US after the erection of the new tariff regime, under which the US$73bn/yr-worth of British goods sold in the US became subject to a 10% tariff.² The latest agreement brought partial relief for an allied sector of UK cement: steel. 180,000t flowed into the US from the UK in 2024.³ In 2024, the UK exported 7120t of cement and clinker to the US, up by a factor of 10 decade-on-decade from just 714t in 2014, all of it into two US customs districts, Philadelphia and New York City.⁴

In what may be one of the first true ‘Brexit benefits,’ UK cement exporters now ‘enjoy’ a US tariff rate half that of their EU competitors, notably those in Greece. Like the UK’s more modest volumes, Greece’s 1.82Mt/yr-worth of cement and clinker exports stateside also enter via the US’ eastern seaports, at New York City, Tampa and Norfolk. Given the overlaps in ownership between the Greek and UK cement sectors, it is conceivable that optimisation of cement export flows across Europe may already be under discussion.

On 6 May 2025, the UK and Indian governments announced a trade deal that will lift customs duties on almost all current Indian exports to the UK. UK MPs are still seeking clarifications as to whether this will include industrial products that might be dumped.⁵ Theoretically, the threat from an oversupplied and fast-growing cement industry like India’s could be existential to the UK cement industry.

As the UK invests heavily in its future, including with the HyNet Consortium, imports pose a major threat. Given enough time, the UK could develop a leading position in the decarbonisation space. Will it have enough time? Existential threats certainly add a sense of jeopardy.

References
1. Mineral Products Association, ‘Weak start to 2025 for building materials sales amid growing economic headwinds,’ 6 May 2025, www.mineralproducts.org/News/2025/release16.aspx

2. HM Government, ‘UK overseas trade in goods statistics November 2024,’ 16 January 2025, www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-overseas-trade-in-goods-statistics-november-2024/uk-overseas-trade-in-goods-statistics-november-2024-commentary

3. UK Steel, ‘US 25% tariffs on UK steel imports come into effect,’ 12 March 2025, www.uksteel.org/steel-news-2025/us-25-tariffs-on-uk-steel-imports-come-into-effect

4. United States Geological Survey, ‘Cement in December 2024,’ January 2025, https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/media/files/mis-202412-cemen.pdf

5. Welsh Liberal Democrats, ‘UK-Indian Trade Deal: Government Refuses to Answer Whether it Has Conceded on Cheap Indian Steel Imports,’ 6 May 2025, www.libdems.wales/news/article/uk-indian-trade-deal-government-refuses-to-answer-whether-it-has-conceded-on-cheap-indian-steel-imports

US: Queens Carbon has secured US$10m in seed funding to scale up production of its novel cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The start-up will build a 2000t/yr demonstration plant at strategic partner Buzzi Unicem USA's Stockertown, Pennsylvania, cement plant. The plant will demonstrate Queens Carbon’s low-energy Q-Reactor technology, which employs novel hydrothermal chemistry, with the help of steam and pressure, to combine standard cement feedstocks into carbon-neutral hydraulic cement and SCMs. The company’s flagship product, Q-SCM, is capable of replacing up to 50% of cement in concrete mixes. Queens Carbon says that it will now also begin preparations for its first full-scale commercial plant.

Buzzi Unicem USA was among investors in the seed funding round, led by Climate technologies investor Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from fellow venture capital firm Plug and Play.

Queens Carbon CEO Daniel Kopp said "With support from Clean Energy Ventures, Buzzi Unicem USA and the US Department of Energy, we're building next-generation technology and assembling the creative talent needed to drive industry revenues to move cement innovation forward and significantly reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production, all without a green premium."

Luigi Buzzi, Chief Technology Officer at Italy-based Buzzi, said "We know that achieving our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 demands forward-thinking solutions to enhance both our operations and our environmental performance.”

US: MTR Carbon Capture says that St Marys Cement’s Charlevoix plant in Michigan will be the first cement plant in the world to deploy its Polaris polymeric membrane-based technology. The pilot project aims to capture 3t/day of CO₂ during a six month testing period. It intends to demonstrate that a 95% CO₂ capture rate is achievable.

US-based Membrane Technology and Research (MTR) specialises in the development and production of membrane-based separation systems for the petrochemical, natural gas and refining industries. The company was set up in 1982 and has its headquarters in Newark, California.