Displaying items by tag: European Union

UK: The Mineral Products Association (MPA) has welcomed government plans for the implementation of a UK carbon border adjustment mechanism for cement by 2027. The association urged the government to develop policy and business models for carbon capture, use and storage, including supporting a domestic carbon neutral and negative products sector.

MPA executive director for energy and climate change Diana Casey said “We cannot take our supply of cement for granted and neither can we put ourselves at risk of unstable international trading markets. That is why today’s commitment to a UK CBAM is so important. Levelling the carbon cost between domestic production and imports will help the UK attract the investment required to decarbonise and ensure our long-term security of supply. The Government’s commitment to bring in the UK CBAM by 2027 is very welcome, and ideally it should be introduced in 2026 to align with the EU scheme. This is the only way to prevent any detrimental impact of the EU CBAM on UK industry.” She added “As well as a CBAM on cement, the MPA would be interested in exploring a CBAM on lime. However, the challenge for the lime sector is ensuring that lime exports can compete in international markets.”

Germany: The European Union Innovation Fund has awarded Heidelberg Materials Euro191m in funding to support its development of a carbon capture and storage (CCS) value chain at Geseke cement plant in North Rhine-Westphalia. The planned project, called GeZero, involves the construction of an oxyfuel kiln, capture system and train transport infrastructure. Having received the funding, Heidelberg Materials and its partners will commence work in January 2024. They will subsequently scale the capture system to 700,000t/yr and build pipelines to transport CO2. Energy provider Wintershall Dea will receive the CO₂ at its upcoming coastal hub for processing and storage below the North Sea.

Heidelberg Materials Germany general manager Christian Knell said “Together with our partners, we walk the talk and pave the way for CCS in Germany. GeZero will complement our global project portfolio with a truly unique approach. We are developing a promising novel solution for inland cement sites, with the intention to inspire industry peers and other emission-intensive sectors to follow.”

Global chief custainability officer Nicola Kimm said “The successful grant agreement demonstrates the relevance of GeZero for the decarbonisation of our sector, and the trust that European authorities place in our approach.”

Belgium: The government of Wallonia and the European Commission’s Just Transition Fund (JTF) have awarded funding to CBR Cement, CCB and Holcim Belgique to support the reduction of CO₂ emissions from Wallonia’s cement plants by 50%. The efforts will focus on renewable energy projects, including the construction of new waste heat recovery (WHR) systems. Alongside two steel plants, the companies will share Euro282m-worth of funding for projects across their four cement plants. The L’Echo newspaper has reported that Wallonia will contribute Euro169m, while the JTF will contribute the remaining Euro177m. The projected cost of planned decarbonisation projects in the Wallonian cement and steel industries is Euro346m. The proposed projects will increase the number of people employed across the sectors by 6.4% to 2773.

Sinoma International Engineering revealed this week that it has signed a Euro218m contract to supply a new clinker production line for Holcim Belgium. The scope of the deal covers building the new line from limestone unloading via train to clinker transportation and storage. Provisional acceptance and first clinker are stipulated to occur within about four years, by late 2027. Holcim Belgium operates the Obourg Plant, its only integrated unit in the country, and the unit has been preparing to build a new line as part of its Go4Zero project.

Two main points compete for one’s attention with the project at the Obourg Plant. Firstly, this may be the first time a large Europe-based cement producer has publicly contracted a China-based supplier to build a new production line. Secondly, the new line is part of a process to first replace two wet kilns at the site with a dry kiln. This is part of a grand plan at the site to add oxyfuel technology to the plant and then start capturing most of the CO₂ emitted for sequestration in the North Sea.

On the first point, China-based Sinoma International Engineering reported to the Shanghai Stock Exchange in early December 2023 that it had signed a contract for the project. Holcim Belgium has not said that it has appointed the subsidiary of CNBM but this is not unusual. Buyers are at liberty to name suppliers, or not as may be the case. Holcim has been talking about the Go4Zero project for several years though, so appointing a lead contractor is not surprising.

Yet, some cement companies in Europe have previously been circumspect about revealing the use of China-based suppliers. Lafarge France, for example, did not appear to publicly name the involvement of Sinoma International Engineering and its subsidiaries on the construction of a new line at its Martres-Tolosane cement plant between 2019 and 2022, although Lafarge Poland did say in 2020 that it had contracted China Triumph International Engineering for an upgrade to its Małogoszcz cement plant. No doubt there have been other plant projects in Europe from China-based suppliers that Global Cement Weekly is unaware of. It is also worth considering that just because a lead contractor on a plant project is from a particular country it doesn’t mean that the equipment and other sub-contractors necessarily are. And, of course, to add to the confusion, some Europe-based equipment suppliers are owned by companies based in China.

This leads to the second point. Holcim Belgium’s eventual goal is to set up a full-scale carbon capture, transportation and sequestration (CCUS) operation at Obourg using oxyfuel technology by the end of the 2020s. Spending over Euro200m on building a new (but conventional) production line is not trivial but it is being presented as one step towards creating a cement plant for the net zero age. To this end Holcim Belgium has been less shy in naming its partners for the second phase of the project: Air Liquide; Fluxys; and TotalEnergies. This may be due to the collaborative nature of this phase though and the need to apply for European Union (EU) funding to support it. In July 2023 Holcim disclosed that the EU Innovation Fund had allocated grants for three of its projects including the one at Obourg.

For reference, a number of other full-scale oxyfuel projects have been announced in Europe including in Germany at Heidelberg Materials' Geseke cement plant, Holcim Deutschland's Lägerdorf plant in Germany and Schwenk Zement’s Mergelstetten plant. Another one is planned for Heidelberg Materials’ CBR's Antoing cement plant in Belgium. Most of these are planned for the late 2020s or with pilots sooner. The key bit of information to consider here is that adding oxyfuel technology to a cement kiln (or building one with it to start with) makes it easier to capture CO₂ from the flue gas as it is more concentrated. However, the technology is newer and less-tested than many post-combustion carbon capture methods. Hence, the world’s first full-scale CCUS unit at a cement plant, at Brevik in Norway, will use a post combustion method.

All of this begs the question about where the value will lie in building cement plants for the age of net zero? The planned work at Holcim Belgium’s Obourg Plant pretty much summarises this quandary. Building a cement production line is expensive but the cost of disposing of CO₂ may become the single-biggest driver of whether a plant is profitable or not if governments are serious about reaching net zero. To that end today’s announcement from the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) calling on the parties to “transition away from fossil fuels to reach net zero” is another sign of the increasing effects of the so-called ‘carbon agenda’ upon the cement sector. In which case the companies that can supply equipment to take care of the CO₂ emissions start becoming more important and discussions over who supplies the rest of the kit less so. Naturally, some cement equipment suppliers are already pivoting towards this approach. Others may find different solutions. Whether this works or not is a question for the future. In the mean-time, building new plants is looking increasingly collaborative.

Poland: The European Commission has granted Lafarge Polska, Air Liquide Polska and energy provider Orlen Euro2.54m in funding for their construction of a 3Mt/yr CO₂ terminal in Gdansk, Pomeranian Voivodeship. The terminal will transmit captured CO₂ from local industrial sites, including 1Mt/yr from Lafarge Polska’s Kujawy w Blelawach cement plant in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, for sequestration below the North Sea. ISB News has reported that the partners will use the European Union funding to complete plans, including front-end engineering design, for the terminal.

UAE: Emirates Steel Arkan (ESA) has appointed consultancy A³&Co. to help plan and implement decarbonisation initiatives at its 5.7Mt/yr Al Ain cement plant in Abu Dhabi. The collaboration will focus on reducing CO₂ emissions and costs, in line with the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi)’s 1.5° Pathway for Net Zero and in conformity to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

ESA is committed to reducing its CO₂ emissions by 40% between 2018 and 2030, and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

Europe: The European Parliament voted in favour of multiple amendments to the European Commission’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) on 22 November 2023. The amendments remove, modify or make non-binding the PPWR’s 2040 reuse targets. Meanwhile, 2030 targets were made adjustable to recycling rates. Total packaging volumes are still required to drop by 5% by 2030 and by 15% by 2040 in each member state.

Sustainability lobbying organisation Environmental Coalition on Standards (ECOS) described the introduction of recycling rates into a lower schema of waste targets as ‘comparing apples with pears.’ ECOS attributed the amendments to a ‘barrage’ of false claims, scaremongering and lobbying from industry players.

ECOS programme manager Mathias Falkenberg said “This decision will not sufficiently address rising plastic and packaging waste or the pollution crisis. The European Parliament has just weakened a perfectly feasible solution to tackle throwaway culture without offering an alternative. It is very frustrating that the European Commission’s progressive prevention and reuse agenda has not received full support from the Parliament today.”

ECOS founded the Alliance for Low-Carbon Cement & Concrete (ALCCC), an association of companies focused on alternative building materials production, in May 2023.

Last week the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced that it was investing US$2bn on over 150 construction projects that use low-embodied carbon (LEC) materials. The funding is intended to support the use of US-manufactured low carbon asphalt, concrete, glass and steel as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. For readers who don’t know, the GSA manages federal government property and provides contracting options for government agencies. As part of this new message, it will spend US$767m on LEC concrete on federal government buildings projects following a pilot that started in May 2023. The full list of the projects can be found here.

This is relevant because the US-based ready-mixed concrete (RMX) market has been valued roughly at around US$60bn/yr. One estimate of how much the US federal government spent on concrete was around US$5bn in 2018. So the government buys a significant minority of RMX in the country, and if it starts specifying LEC products, this will affect the industry. And, at present at least, a key ingredient of all that concrete is cement.

This isn’t the first time that legislators in the US have specified LEC concrete. In 2019 Marin County in California introduced what it said was the world’s first building code that attempted to minimise carbon emissions from concrete production. It did this by setting maximum ordinary Portland cement (OPC) and embodied carbon levels and offering several ways suppliers can achieve this, including increasing the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), using admixtures, optimising concrete mixtures and so on. Unlike the GSA’s approach in November 2023 though, this applies to all plain and reinforced concrete installed in the area, not just a portion of procured concrete via a government agency. Other similar regional schemes in the US include limits on embodied carbon levels in RMX in Denver, Colorado, and a reduction in the cement used in RMX in Berkeley, California. Environmental services company Tangible compiled a wider list of embodied carbon building codes in North America that can be viewed here. This grouping also includes the use of building intensity policies, whole building life cycle assessments (LCA), environmental product declarations (EPD), demolition and deconstruction directives, tax incentives and building reuse plans.

Government-backed procurement codes promoting or requiring the use of LEC building materials for infrastructure projects have been around for a while in various places. The general trend has been to start with measurement via tools such as LCAs and EPDs, move on to government procurement and then start setting embodied carbon limits for buildings. In the US the GSA’s latest pronouncement follows on from the Federal Buy Clean Initiative and from when California introduced its Buy Clean California Act in 2017. Outside of the US similar programmes have been introduced in countries including Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. On the corporate side members of the World Economic Forum’s First Movers’ Coalition have committed to purchasing or specifying volumes of LEC cement and/or concrete by 2030. Examples of whole countries actually setting embodied carbon emissions limits for non-government buildings are rarer, but some are emerging. Both France and Sweden, for example, introduced laws in 2022 that start by analysing life-cycle emissions of buildings and will move on to setting embodied carbon limits in the late 2020s. Denmark, Finland and New Zealand are also in the process of introducing similar schemes. The next big move could be in the EU, where legislators are considering embodied carbon limits for building materials as part of its ongoing revisions to its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive or the Construction Products Regulation legislations. Lobbying, debate and arguing remains ongoing at present.

To finish, Ireland-based Ecocem spent a period in the 2010s attempting to build a slag cement grinding plant at Vallejo, Solano County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. The project met with considerable local opposition on environmental grounds and was eventually refused planning permission. The irony is that slag cement is one of those SCM-style cements that Marin County, also in the San Francisco Bay Area, started encouraging the use of just a few years later. Ecocem held its inaugural science symposium in Paris this week. A number of scientists who attended the event called for existing low carbon technologies to be adopted by the cement and concrete sectors as fast as possible. One such approach is to lower the clinker factor in cement through the use of products that Ecocem and other companies sell. A point to consider is, if Marin County’s code or the GSA’s recent procurement directive came earlier, then that slag plant in Vallejo might have been built. Encouraging the use of LEC building materials by governments looks set to proliferate but it may not be a straightforward process. Clear and consistent policies will be key.

Cementos Molins has been celebrating the first anniversary this week of its alternative raw materials unit at its Sant Vicenç dels Horts plant near Barcelona. It has processed 75,000t of waste since September 2022 when the site started up. More is yet to come as the unit has a production capacity of up to 200,000t/yr. The facility receives waste in coarse, granular, powder and sludge formats. Waste from concrete plants is crushed and screened to produce recycled aggregate. Industrial and construction waste is dosed and homogenised to produce alternative raw materials for cement production.

Global Cement Weekly has covered construction and demolition waste (CDW) a couple of times already so far in 2023. A number of cement producers are investing in the sector - including Holcim, Heidelberg Materials, CRH, Cemex – by developing technology, buying up other companies, setting up internal CDW divisions and so on. Holcim and Heidelberg Materials have been the more obviously active participants over the past six months based on media coverage. In September 2023 Holcim France commissioned the Saint-Laurent-de-Mûre alternative raw materials plant and Holcim Group invested in Neustark, a company promoting technology to sequester CO₂ in CDW. In August 2023 Lafarge Canada also completed the first stage of a pilot project to use CDW in cement production at its St. Constant plant in Quebec. Heidelberg Materials meanwhile announced in October 2023 that a forthcoming upgrade to its Górażdże cement plant in Poland would include a new CDW recycling unit and in September 2023 it launched a CDW division for its subsidiary Hanson UK.

Previously we have described how the European Union (EU) has set recovery targets for CDW. However, McKinsey & Company published research in March 2023 setting out the economic case for cement and concrete companies looking at CDW. It estimated that “an increased adoption of circular technologies could be linked to the emergence of new financial net-value pools worth up to roughly Euro110bn by 2050.” It is not a certainty and there is risk involved, but adopting circular practices is one way to reduce this risk. It then went on to predict that recirculating materials and minerals could generate nearly Euro80bn/yr in earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the cement and concrete sectors by 2050. The biggest portion of this could come from using CDW in various ways such as a clinker replacement or as an aggregate in concrete production, or the use of unhydrated cement ‘fines.’ Capturing and using CO₂ and increasing alternative fuels (AF) substitution rates would have a financial impact but not to the same scale.

Graph 1: CO₂ abatement cost via circular technologies for cement and concrete sectors. Source: McKinsey & Company.

Graph 1 above puts all of the McKinsey circular technology suggestions in one place with the prediction that all of these methods could reduce CO₂ emissions from cement and concrete production by 80% in 2050 based on an estimated demand of 4Bnt/yr. The first main point they made was that technologies using CO₂, such as curing ready-mix or precast concrete, can create positive economic value at carbon prices of approximately Euro80/t of CO₂. Readers should note that the EU emissions Trading Scheme CO₂ price has generally been above Euro80t/yr since the start of 2022. The second point to note is that using CDW could potentially save money by offering CO₂ abatement at a negative cost through avoiding landfill gate fees and reducing the amount of raw materials required. This is dependent though on government regulation on CO₂ prices, landfill costs and so on.

Cement producers have been clearly aware of the potential of CDW for a while now, based on the actions described above and elsewhere, and they are jockeying for advantage. These companies are familiar with the economic rationale for AF and secondary cementitious materials (SCM) in different countries and locations. CDW usage is similar but with, in McKinsey’s view, existing CO₂ prices, landfill costs, and regulatory frameworks all playing a part in the calculations. Graph 1 is a prediction but it is also another way of showing the path of least resistance to decarbonisation. It is cheaper to start with AF, SCMs and CDW rather than barrelling straight into carbon capture. The beauty here is that cement and concrete sold, say, 50 years ago is now heading back to the producers in the form of CDW and it still has value.

Bulgaria: Heidelberg Materials subsidiary Devnya Cement has commenced construction of the ANRAV.beta carbon capture pilot unit at its Devnya cement plant near Varna. Construction will take ‘a few months,’ followed by a pilot trial lasting 12 – 24 months. The ANRAV system will rely on OxyCal oxygen-enriched burner technology to eventually capture 800,000t/yr of CO₂ from 3Mt/yr of plant flue emissions. The project has Euro190m in grants from the EU Innovation Fund and is scheduled for delivery in 2028.

Heidelberg Materials’ Northern and Eastern Europe-Central Asia regional director Ernest Jelito said “The OxyCal technology we will be trialling in Devnya is a crucial addition to our portfolio of capture technologies. Obtaining solid operational data from industrial pilots like this is essential to ensure the successful implementation of projects under our comprehensive CCUS investment programme. At the same time, we can demonstrate an economically feasible way to decarbonise carbon-intensive industries in Eastern Europe.”