Displaying items by tag: Ghana

Ghana: A court has issued an injunction for Empire Cement to desist from operating its unlicensed McCarthy Hills cement facility. Ghana News Agency has reported that the China-based producer's activities at the site present a health hazard to local people. The McCarthy Hills Residents' Association said that the company was established to be exclusively a producer of paper bags for cement products.

Algeria: Groupe des Ciments d'Algérie (GICA) has obtained a certificate of conformity with European standards (CE) for three types of cement. The certification should allow the company to export more products to Europe, according to the Expression newspaper. It applies to its Gica Moudhad and Gica Béton products. The move follows similar certification of products with the Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) from the company’s Aïn El Kebira plant in July 2021. At the same time the Minister of Industry said it was helping the group with its export strategy.

In 2021 GICA exported 2.25Mt of cement to countries including the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, Senegal , Cameroon, Benin,  Guinea, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and a number of European countries.

Ghana: Alan Kyerematen, the Minister for Trade and Industry, has blamed the increasing price of cement on negative currency exchange effects and growing fuel prices. He informed the Parliament of Ghana that the cost to import clinker has risen significantly, according to the Ghana News Agency. Kyerematen also noted that the cost of freight has surged due to the coronavirus pandemic and then the war in Ukraine.

Ghana: Heidelberg said that it has signed an agreement with CBI for the acquisition of 50% of the latter’s shares. CBI is the parent company of CBI Ghana, which operates the 0.6Mt/yr Tema grinding plant in Accra. It is in the process of establishing a calcined clay plant at the facility. HeidelbergCement says that it and CBI will explore the possibility of further calcined clay projects in West Africa. Other investors in CBI Ghana include Denmark-based Investeringsfonden for Udviklingslande (IFU) and Norway-based Norfund.

HeidelbergCement’s existing Ghanaian susbidiary Ghacem operates 3Mt/yr-worth of grinding capacity at two plants in Accra and Takoradi.

HeidelbergCement managing board member Hakan Gurdal said “Characterised by high sustained market growth rates, Ghana is one of HeidelbergCement’s core markets in Africa. The new flash calciner in Ghana will be the largest worldwide, with a calcined clay production capacity of more than 400,000t/yr. Start of production is planned for 2024.” Gurdal concluded “We are committed to lowering our CO₂ footprint also in emerging markets.”

Nigeria: Dangote Cement sales volumes in the first quarter of 2022 have been hampered by disruptions to gas supplies domestically and by high freight rates restricting its exports of cement and clinker to Cameroon, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Its sales volumes of cement fell by 3.6% year-on-year to 7.25Mt in the first quarter of 2022 from 7.52Mt in the same period in 2021. Its revenue grew by 24% to US$994m from US$801m. Its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) increased by 18.6% to US$508m from US$428m.

Michael Pucheros, the chief executive officer of Dangote Cement, said “Our group volumes were down 3.6% mainly due to energy supply challenges in Nigeria. Our operations relying on cement and clinker imports – namely Ghana, Sierra-Leone, Cameroon - were impacted by the global supply chain challenges.” Additionally, its operations outside of Nigeria was also negatively affected by a cement plant in Congo being shut for over two months due to maintenance and repairs and extended power plant maintenance in Senegal.

Vicat’s plans to buy another 42% stake in Sinai Cement became public this week. Once completed, the France-based company should own 98% of the Egyptian company, based on previously published ownership figures. The announcement heralds a rapprochement in the relationship between the cement producer and the Egyptian government.

Last year Vicat raised a case against the government with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) over an argument about how it could invest in Sinai Cement as a foreign company. All seems forgiven and forgotten now with a settlement agreement signed in March 2022 between Rania el Mashat, the Minister of International Cooperation on behalf of the Egyptian government, and Guy Sidos, the chairman and chief executive officer of Vicat Group. Local press reported that the government is trying to attract more direct foreign investment. Sinai Cement reported a loss attributable to its parent company of around US$19.1m in 2021, down from a loss of US$30.3m in 2020. However, its sales rose by 63% year-on-year to US$78m.

Sinai Cement has some specific operating issues related to its geographic position in the Sinai Peninsula and ongoing security concerns. Yet its mixed fortunes also sum up some of the continuing challenges the Egyptian cement industry is facing. After years of overcapacity, the government introduced reduced cement production quotas in July 2021 and this is mostly perceived to have improved prices in the second half of the year. Vicat described the arrangement as having capped the local market at 65% of its production capacity and it said that prices recovered ‘significantly’ as a result in the second half of 2021. Cemex’s regional chief Carlos Gonzalez told local press that the move had given plants “A glimmer of hope for the return of balance to the cement market.” The company has also announced a US$20m local investment backing up this view. Not all the foreign multinational companies entirely agreed, with HeidelbergCement reporting a ‘sharp’ decline in sales volumes although chief executive officer Dominik von Achten did describe the country as ‘coming back’ in an earnings call about his company’s financial results in 2021. Solomon Baumgartner Aviles, the chief executive officer of Lafarge Egypt, was also cooler about the production cap in a press interview in October 2021, describing it as too early to assess how well the cap was working and noting that the gap between supply and demand was still large.

Vicat said in its annual report for 2021 that, “Provided no further adverse geopolitical, health or security developments occur, the current climate is unlikely to jeopardise the prospects of an improvement in the subsidiary’s profitability, which should begin to gradually occur.” The geopolitical bit was timely given that Russia’s war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022. It also targets the latest problem hitting Egyptian cement producers: energy costs. The head of Arabian Cement told Enterprise Press that initially some producers had opted to temporarily stop production and use stocks instead to attempt to try and wait until the energy price volatility ended. However, it stayed high so the cost of cement has gone up generally. Producers are now trying to switch to using a high ratio of natural gas, such as 10%, but this is dependent on the government letting them.

The Egyptian government, for its part, is facing a decision whether to supply subsidised gas for domestic industry or to export to Europe. The backstory here is that Egyptian cement producers are facing yet another step change in fuel supply. In the mid-2010s lots of plants switched from heavy fuel oil and gas to coal. High international coal prices could be heralding another change.

Alongside this the value of Egypt’s cement exports rose by 151% year-on-year to US$456m in 2021 from US$182m in 2020. The Cement Division of the Federation of Egyptian Industries has attributed this to growth mainly on the African market. This trend continued in January and February 2022 with cement exports up by 141% year-on-year to US$104m from US$43m. The main destinations were Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Libya.

HeidelbergCement summed up the current state of the Egyptian cement market in its 2021 annual report as follows “The development of the Egyptian cement market continues to be determined by government intervention.” What happens next is very much in the hands of the state as it decides whether to extend the production cap, which fuels to subsidise, whether to allow exports and where to invest in infrastructure projects. One variation on this theme may be local decarbonisation targets. At the end of March 2022 the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) launched a series of Net Zero Accelerator initiatives, including one in Egypt. How a country that produces more cement than it needs reduces its CO₂ emissions presents another challenge for manufacturers and the government to grapple with.

Ghana: Denmark-based Investeringsfonden for Udviklingslande (IFU) and Norway-based Norfund have invested US$27.9m in CBI Ghana. The funding will support the cement producer’s upgrade of a clay calcination unit at its 0.6Mt/yr Tema grinding plant in Accra. Denmark-based FLSmidth is supplying the equipment for the project.

Ghana: The Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) has reported discoveries of Empire Cement brand cement on sale on the open market despite neither it nor the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) having issued permits for Empire Cement to produce cement. Graphic Online News has reported that the suspect products are wrongly labelled with certification marks. GSA director general Alex Dodoo warned that this constitutes an offence.

Ghana: FLSmidth has secured a contract for the supply of a clay calcination plant at CBI Ghana's 0.6Mt/yr Tema grinding plant in Accra. The supplier says that it will also install a complete grinding station to more than double the plant's production capacity. FLSmidth says that the entire project will reduce the Tema facility's CO₂ footprint by 20%. When commissioned, the new clay calcination plant will be the largest in the world, according to the supplier.

CBI Ghana chief executive officer Frédéric Albrecht said “Ghana is the perfect location for using clay as an environmentally friendly alternative to clinker. West Africa is traditionally a clinker and cement-importing region due to the lack of suitable limestone reserves. Developing countries with their young populations and a growing need for infrastructure and housing represent the future in cement consumption. Calcined clay cements are the most sustainable alternative to traditional clinker-based cement."

Türkçimento’s Volkan Bozay took to the airwaves last week to raise the issues that the war in Ukraine is causing for Turkey-based cement producers. The head of the Turkish Cement Manufacturers’ Association explained, to the local Bloomberg HT channel, that the dramatic jump in the price of Newcastle Coal posed a serious threat to the sector. The price jumped nearly US$100/t in a single day in early March 2022. Bozay said that the cost of cement from a plant using imported coal would consequently rise by around US$15/t. He added that the association’s members had an average of 15 – 20 days of coal stocks.

Graph 1: Price of coal, March 2020 – March 2021. Source: Trading Economics.

In a separate press release Türkçimento revealed that Turkey, as a whole, imported approximately US$1.5bn of coal from Russia in 2021. The cement industry imported about 5Mt of coal in 2021, from all sources, although the majority of this came from Russia. Coal shipments from Russia since the start of the war were reported as ‘very limited or even not possible.’ It was further explained that each US$10/t increase in the price of coal put up plant production costs by US$1.5/t of cement.

Naturally Bozay’s appearance on a television news show carried a lobbying aspect. He called for government import standards – such as the sulphur ratio, lower heating values and volatile matter limits - to be relaxed to allow coal to be imported more freely from sources such as Colombia, Indonesia and South Africa. There was also a push to let in more alternative fuels such as tyres and waste-derived fuels. The bit that Bozay didn’t mention though was how many of his members had long term coal supply contracts in place to cushion them, from short term price inflation at least. Yet, if coal shipments from Russia have simply stopped, then the price is irrelevant. A cement kiln configured to run on coal stops when it uses up its stocks.

Turkey was the world’s fifth largest cement producer in 2021 according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Türkçimento data shows that in 2020 it exported 145,000t of cement to Russia by sea. Overall it exported 16.3Mt of cement and 13.5Mt of clinker. The US, Israel, Syria, Haiti and Libya were the top destinations for cement. Notably, Ukraine was the sixth largest recipients of cement, with 752,000t imported, although anti-dumping legislation introduced in mid-2021 looked set to reduce it until the war started. Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Cameroon and Belgium were the principal recipients of clinker. Cumulative cement exports for the year to October 2021 were up by 3% year-on-year compared to the first 10 months of 2020. Clinker exports were down by 27% though. Overall domestic production and sales in Turkey rose by 9.5%, suggested an estimated production figure of 79Mt for 2021.

Other fallout in the cement sector from the war in Ukraine this week included Ireland-based CRH’s decision to quit the Russian market. It entered the region in 1998 through a subsidiary based in Finland and was operating seven ready-mixed concrete plants via its LujaBetomix joint venture. CRH says that all operations in Russia have now stopped. In 2021 it sold its lime business in Russia, Fels Izvest, to Russia-based Bonolit. Although selling concrete plants is not trivial, these are far cheaper assets than clinker production lines. Germany-based HeidelbergCement, Italy-based Buzzi Unicem and Switzerland-based Holcim each operate at least one integrated cement plant in Russia. So far these companies have publicly expressed dismay at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine and made donations to the Red Cross.

Graph 2: European Union Emission Trading Scheme price, 2020 – March 2022. Source: Sandbag.

Finally, one more surprise this week has been a crash in the European Union (EU) Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) carbon price from a high of Euro96/t in early February 2022 to Euro58/t on 7 March 2022. As other commentators have stated, normally the carbon price would be expected to follow the energy market, but this hasn’t happened. Instead investors have pulled out, possibly to maintain liquidity for other markets.

With the US set to ban Russian oil, gas and coal imports and phase-outs to varying degrees promised by the UK and the EU in 2022, we can expect more turbulence from energy markets in the coming days. As the Turkish example above shows, all of this can... and will... have effects on cement production.