Displaying items by tag: GCW288

Last week’s Global CemFuels Conference in Barcelona raised a considerable amount of information about the state of the alternative fuels market for the cement industry and recent technical advances. One particular facet that stuck out were reports from cement and waste producers, from their perspective, about Morocco’s decision to ban imports of waste from Italy in mid-2016. The debacle raises prickly questions about how decisive attempts to reduce carbon emissions can be.

Public outcry broke out in Morocco in July 2016 over imports of refuse derived fuel (RDF) imported from Italy for use at a cement plant in the country. At the time a ship carrying 2500t of RDF was stopped at the Jorf Lasfar port. Local media and activists presented the shipment in terms of a dangerous waste, ‘too toxic’ for a European country, which was being dumped on a developing one. Public outcry followed and despite attempts to calm the situation the government soon banned imports of ‘waste’.

What wasn’t much reported at the time was that RDF usage rates in Europe have been rising in recent years and that the product is viewed as a commodity. As Michele Graffigna from HeidelbergCement explained at the conference in his presentation, its subsidiary Italcementi runs seven cement plants in Italy but only two of them have the permits to use alternative fuels like RDF. Italy also has amongst the lowest rates of alternative fuels usage in Europe, in part due to issues with legislation. This is changing slowly but the company has an export strategy for waste fuels from the country at the moment. Italy’s largest cement producer wants to use waste fuels in Italy but it can’t fully, so it is exporting them so it (and others) is exporting them to countries where it can.

In the Waste Hierarchy, using waste as energy fits in the ‘other recovery’ section near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, but it is still preferable to disposal. Waste fuels may be smelly, unsightly and have other concerns but they are a better environmental option than burning fossil fuels. HeidelbergCement engaged locally with media and local authorities to try and convey this. It also arranged visits to RDF production sites in Italy and German cement plant that use RDF to present its message. Looking to the future, HeidelbergCement now plans to focus on local waste production in Morocco with projects for a tyre shredder at a cement plant and an RDF production site at a Marrakesh landfill site in the pipeline. Graffigna didn’t say so directly, but the decision to focus on local waste supplies clearly dispenses with historical and cultural baggage of moving ‘dirty’ products between countries.

In another talk, at the conference Andy Hill of Suez then mentioned the Morocco situation from his company’s angle. His point was that moving waste fuels around can carry risks and that a waste management company, like Suez, knows how to handle them. It is worth pointing out here that Suez UK has supplied solid recovered fuel (SRF) to the country so it has a commercial interest here. He also suggested that despatching a bulk vessel of waste to a sensitive market did not help the situation and that it heightened negative publicity.

Morocco’s decision to ban the import of waste fuels in mid-2016 is an unfortunate speed bump along the highway to a more sustainable cement industry. It raises all sorts of issues about public perceptions of environmental efforts to clean up the cement industry and where they clash with commercially minded attempts to do so by the cement producers. A similar battle is playing out in Ireland between locals in Limerick and Irish Cement, as it tries to start burning tyres and RDF. These are not new issues. Meanwhile in the background the amendment to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme draws close with a vote set for mid-February 2017. It could have implications for all of this depending on what happens. More on this later in the month.

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.

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.

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.

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.

UK/Ireland: Quinn Cement is planning to build a Euro2.9m port facility at Warrenpoint Harbour in County Down in Northern Ireland, UK. The 7500t terminal will be operated over a 10-year period in conjunction with the Warrenpoint Harbour Authority, according to the Irish Independent. Final commissioning for the project was approved in late January 2017. The investment is intended to compliment the company’s update to its terminal in Rochester, Kent in England and to help the company ‘cope’ with the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.

Spain: Cementos Portland Valderrivas (CPV) has made a loss of Euro225m in 2016. It increased from a loss of Euro62m in 2015. It reported that its sales fell by 7.6% year-on-year to Euro536m in 2016 from Euro580m in 2015. It attributed this to the sale of its US subsidiary, Giant Cement, falling sales in Tunisia, a decrease in the value of the Tunisian dinar and rising fuel prices.

The cement producer’s sales volumes of cement fell slightly to 7.2Mt in 2016. However, once sales from Giant Cement are removed then, its sales volumes rose by 1.6% due to a 49% increase in exports from Spain. This compensated for declining markets in Spain and Tunisia.

The cement producer said that overall cement consumption in Spain fell by 3.1% to 11.1Mt in 2016, although this was partially offset by exports rising by 5.6% to 9.8Mt. Reduced domestic demand and rising exports have led to clinker production rising slightly in 2016 to 17Mt. It added that cement consumption increases were slowing down in the US, although the regions its subsidiary Giant Cement operates in reported above average increases of almost 11% to November 2016 in the South East, Mid Atlantic and New England regions. In Tunisia it reported that the market fell by 3.9% to 7.2Mt and that exports to Algeria and Libya had fallen.

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.

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.

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.