Displaying items by tag: Coprocessing
China embraces alternative fuels
29 March 2017Lots of fascinating information has been emerging in recent weeks about changes in the Chinese cement industry as the larger producers have published their annual financial results. One example is the focus on using alternative fuels to fire up kilns. As explained below, the spotlight on co-processing is state-mandated and this is why the producers are now keen to promote their adherence. Even so, as ever with China, the scale of the change is staggering.
For example, Anhui Conch reported that it had completed 15 waste treatment projects and one sludge treatment project in 2016. In addition it had three projects still undergoing construction at the year-end. The group said that it co-processed 600,000t of domestic waste in its cement kilns in 2016. All of this was achieved by a company that says it only started co-processing municipal waste from its first project in 2010. China Resources Cement’s (CRC) progress was slower but it managed to start a co-processing project at its plant in Binyang County, Guangxi in December 2015 and a sludge project in Nanning City, Guangxi in July 2016. New projects at Tianyang County, Guangxi and Midu County, Yunnan are being built at present, with completion expected by the end of 2017.
Long held rumours about production overcapacity in China came to head in 2015 with the National Bureau of Statistics in China (NBSC) reporting that sales dropped in 2015 following a decade of steady growth. Then the results of most of major producers followed this by falling in 2015. CRC presented a good history of what happened next in the Chinese cement industry in its results report [LINK]. In brief, in 2016 the Chinese government implemented supply-side structural reforms focusing on production efficiency, reiterating attempts to stop new production capacity being built and pushing environmental reforms. Throughout the year various government offices released guidelines to encourage market consolidation, cut obsolete production capacity, increase co-processing rates and decrease the energy needed to produce each tonne of clinker.
Graph 1: Cement sales in China, 2012 – 2016. Source: National Bureau of Statistics in China.
Whether or not any of this has helped the Chinese cement industry to overcome the problems it faced in 2015 is unclear. As Graph 1 shows, Chinese cement sales started to rise again slightly to 2.35Bnt in 2016 from 2.31Bnt in 2015. Sales revenue from some of the major cement producers presents a more varied picture as can be seen in Graph 2. Anhui Conch’s revenue rose by 9.7% year-on-year to US$8.12bn in 2016, China National Building Material Company’s (CNBM) revenue rose by 1% to US$14.8bn and CRC’s revenue fell by 4.2% to US$3.3bn. CRC may have suffered here from its relative business concentration in southeast China. Both Anhui Conch’s and CNBM’s results seemed to look patchy in mid-2016 when they released their half-year reports, but both sales and profits seemed to pick up sharply in the second half of the year.
Graph 2: Sales revenue from selected major Chinese cement producers. Source: Company annual reports.
As the current set of structural reforms kick in within the Chinese cement industry it will be interesting to see what happens next. From plans to cut 10% of local clinker production capacity by 2020 to ambitious environmental aims the sector barely has time to catch its breath. The question is whether the major producers balance sheets are being helped more by a recovering local market or by the reforms. Either way the uptake of alternative fuels is encouraging.
Lafarge Canada to test burning tyres at its Brookfield plant
30 September 2016Canada: Lafarge Canada has started a partnership with Dalhousie University researcher Mark Gibson to test tyre-derived fuel on an industrial scale at the Brookfield cement plant in Nova Scotia. Working under a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, this initiative will research the adoption of low carbon fuels in the cement industry. The research will continue the partnership between Lafarge Canada and Dalhousie's Faculty of Engineering.
"My students and I are very pleased to see this work enter the real world. Based on our research, we expect to see significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the Brookfield cement plant and thereby help Nova Scotia move one step closer to a low carbon economy," said Gibson. He added that the use of tires will also reduce NOx emissions. In 2015, Gibson and his team published a report entitled ‘Use of scrap tyres as an alternative fuel source at the Lafarge cement kiln, Brookfield, Nova Scotia.’
Due to different initiatives including previous work with Dalhousie's Faculty of Engineering, the Brookfield plant has substituted alternative fuels for conventional ones by using front-end burner injection in its kiln. The plant is expected to reach a substitution rate of up to 30% by the end of 2016. Following the test using tyres the cement producer expects to use 15% of its fuel requirements from 450,000 tyres per year, or just under half the amount of tyres generated in Nova Scotia. The project proposal will be explained in further detail at a Public Meeting planned for 20 October 2016 in Brookfield.
Ireland: Irish Cement is planning to cut the amount alternative fuels it intends to co-process at its Limerick cement plant to 90,000t/yr. The cement producer withdrew its initial planning application in March 2016 but has resubmitted a new application with a lower amount of alternative fuels, according to the Limerick Leader newspaper. It now aims to burn half of the original amount that was originally requested.
It originally announced its Euro10m plan to co-process alternative fuels including tyres at the plant in December 2015. The investment is intended to create 40 jobs. However, local citizens have opposed the plans with over 450 people signing a petition against the development.
Irish Cement defers plan to burn tyres at Limerick plant
21 March 2016Ireland: Irish Cement has deferred its plan to co-process tyres at its Limerick cement plant. Planning was lodged in late February 2016, according to the Irish Examiner. However a spokesman for Irish Cement said that the company had noted a few days previously that the planning application had not been made available for public inspection, due to a ‘procedural’ matter. They added that the company was working with the Limerick City and Country Council to resolve the issue.
Local Green Party candidate James Gaffney raised concerns about the plant upgrade in local press in mid-March 2016. He alleged that no public consultation was being carried out on the plant’s plans and that the application was being fast-tracked. Irish Cement denied these claims.
Irish Cement announced its plan to burn alternative fuels at its Limerick plant in December 2015.
US: The GCC (Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua) Dacotah cement plant in Rapid City has started a US$90m upgrade. The project will include new kiln equipment, provision for co-processing alternative fuels and improvements to the plant’s shipping operations, according to the Rapid City Journal. The upgrade will increase the plant’s cement production capacity to 1.3Mt/yr.
The plant was founded by the South Dakota state in the 1920s and sold into private ownership in 2001. It employs 130 full-time employees. The upgrade is expected to create 13 new full-time jobs.
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Environmental Protection Agency defers approval for tyre-derived fuel plant at Bestway Cement
29 February 2016Pakistan: The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has deferred the approval for setting up a tyre-derived fuel (TDF) plant at the Bestway Cement plant in Farooqia. The decision has been left by the EPA to consent from the local community, according to local press.
EPA Director General Dr Bashir Khan said at a public meeting that unless local residents were satisfied, Bestway Cement would not be issued a no-objection certificate. Residents have cited dust, smoke, noise and water pollution as reasons to object against the proposed plant. Qamar Hayat, a local activist, said that locals would allow the EPA to approve the TDF plant when they were guaranteed pollution would be monitored and that health hazards and property losses would be checked.
Gorazdze to raise thermal substitution rate to up to 80%
11 February 2016Poland: Gorazdze Cement intends to cut costs partly by increasing its usage of alternative fuels, according to its CEO Ernest Jelito. As the Polish cement producer is currently operating at a 60 – 70% capacity utilisation rate it has no plans to increase its capacity. Gorazdze Cement has a thermal substitution rate of around 50% at present and it intends to raise this to 70 – 80%.
Encouraging news from Egypt with the announcement that Lafarge Ecocem has taken on two refuse-derived fuels (RDF) contracts in Suez and Qalyubeya. The RDF plants will have production capacities of 42,000t/yr and 280,000t/yr respectively, after upgrades are built.
The move follows a deal Lafarge struck with Orascom in March 2015 to develop a waste management framework of municipal and agricultural waste. The plan is to achieve an average fuel substitution rate of 25% by the end of 2015. Around the same time Ecocem also signed a cooperation agreement with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and the Qalyubeya Governorate to upgrade a recycling plant in Qalyubeya to produce RDF. Part of the deal was intended to reinvest some of the revenue from RDF sales back into the region's waste collection infrastructure.
These production levels compare to SITA UK's new RDF plants in the UK, which has a more mature RDF market. There, the newly opened Malpass Farm plant is planned to produce 200,000t/yr and the Tilbury plant will have an output capacity of 500,000t/yr when it opens. However, the Malpass Farm plant mainly feeds one cement plant, the 1.3Mt/yr Cemex Rugby plant with a mean substitution rate of 61% in 2013. By contrast, Lafarge Cement Egypt runs the massive 10.6Mt/yr El Sokhna plant.
Co-processing at El Sokhna by Lafarge is of particular interest given the links with Egypt's unofficial household waste collectors, the Zabbaleen. Lafarge Egypt recruited and trained 140 Zabbaleen to gather waste material for RDF production. The strategy enabled Lafarge to gather continuous supplies of RDF and strengthen local stakeholder relations, as Lafarge's 2013 sustainability report puts it. Lafarge Egypt's substitution rate was 2.2% in 2012 with significant improvements made since then. The current target of 25% for the end of 2015 shows how much progress Lafarge has made.
Hisham Sherif of the Egyptian Company for Solid Waste Recycling (Ecaru) placed Egypt's municipal solid waste level at 20Mt/yr at a presentation given at the Global CemFuels Conference earlier in 2015. From this 4Mt/yr of RDF could be produced. Together with biomass derived fuel (BDF) Sherif reckoned that the country's cement plants could reach substitution rates of 30 – 40%. Problems though with increasing RDF rates in Egypt include legal complexities, institutional issues, poor services and monitoring and centralised planning with little regard for the country's unofficial waste pickers, such as the Zabaleen.
Lafarge Ecocem appears to be tackling each of these problems in turn as the deals with Orascom and the Qalyubeya Governorate show. However, spare a thought for Egypt's unofficial waste sector workers who are likely to lose their livelihoods as waste management becomes more formalised and personnel rates per tonne of waste collected tumble.
For more information on the Zabaleen, check out the documentary made about them in 2009, called 'Garbage Dreams'.
Australia: The Boral cement plant in Berrima, New South Wales, will receive a US$3.3m grant from the Environmental Trust as part of the NSW Environment Protection Authority's Waste Less, Recycle More initiative. The funding will be used to increase the use of waste derived fuels at the plant.
Executive general manager for Boral Cement Ross Harper said the achievement of the grant confirmed the potentially-important role that the New Berrima site could play in reducing the increasing impact of re-usable materials ending up in landfills.
"Since September, we have been informing our local stakeholders about the positive environmental and economic effects which can be obtained by replacing a portion of our coal consumption at Berrima with fuels derived from recovered and processed waste streams," said executive general manager for Boral Cement, Ross Harper.
Boral is currently preparing to submit planning applications which will seek approval for the use of wood waste-derived fuel and refuse-derived fuel in production at the Berrima plant. The site already holds an approval to use rubber tyre chips. Pending approvals, the site is looking to begin integration of the two fuels from the start of 2016 following construction of the new infrastructure.
India: The Pollution Control Board has despatched 20,000t of effluent sludge generated by textile units in the SIPCOT Industrial Estate in Perundurai to cement plants in Ariyalur district in Tamil Nadu state for use as an alternative fuel. Local media reports that local cement producers have started accepting effluent sludge from the dying industry after the success of a trial run that indicated no variation in the strength and quality of cement. Following the first order demand for another 8000t has been expressed.