Displaying items by tag: Grinding

US: ThyssenKrupp Polysius has won an order for the supply of two of its roll units with compound cast roll bodies at a US cement facility. The equipment will form part of a Polycom high-pressure grinding roll. ThyssenKrupp Polysius’ Germany and US service teams will collaborate on the order, for delivery in March 2023.

Austria: Lafarge Zement has announced the successful commissioning of a new raw meal mill at its Mannersdorf cement plant in Lower Austria. CEO Berthold Kren congratulated process engineer Nina Wolf and the Mannersdorf plant team for carrying out the Euro23m project.

Germany/Italy: Italy-based Buzzi Unicem has launched its CGreen reduced-CO₂ cement on the German and Italian cement markets. The product uses alternative raw materials to partially replace clinker and also optimises grinding and mixing conditions through the use of novel specialist additives. In Germany, the available range of CGreen cements will consist of Dyckerhoff Eco Comfort cement and Dyckerhoff Cedur cement.

Italy cemeny chief operating officer Antonio Buzzi said "The ecological transition calls for us to adapt our behaviors and actions in order to neutralise our carbon footprint. This transition implies the partial or total redesign of production processes, distribution systems and consumption patterns, heralding the start of a potential industrial revolution and a change in our habits."

Peru: Cementos Pacasmayo recorded full-year sales of US$519m in 2021, up by 49% year-on-year from US$348m in 2020. Sales exceeded pre-Covid levels of US$373m in 2019 by 39%. The company’s profit for the year was US$41m, more than double its profit of US$15.5m in 2020 and up by 16% from US$35.4m in 2019.

The Semana Económica newspaper has reported that Cementos Pacasmayo aims to maintain its 2021 full-year cement sales volumes in 2022. The company is in the process of a US$70m, 600,000t/yr clinker capacity expansion in order to increase its clinker capacity to 100% of its grinding capacity, from 61% currently. This will eliminate the producer’s reliance on clinker imports.

Australia: First Graphene has started a five year collaboration research and development agreement with construction chemicals manufacturer Fosroc International to develop its PureGraph graphene-based cement additive product range. First Graphene will provide access to its formulation and dispersion process technologies and Fosroc will take responsibility for additive raw material supplies and formulations, mixing and dispersion and extensive laboratory trials. The objective of the deal is to jointly develop a range of PureGraph-enhanced cement additives that Fosroc will add to its portfolio of specialty products.

Michael Bell, the managing director and chief executive officer of First Graphene, said, “The agreement with Fosroc is a significant further step for First Graphene as we implement our go-to-market plan to become the world’s leading supplier of graphene-enhanced cement and concrete solutions. Fosroc has significant penetration into multiple global markets that will be highly beneficial in helping expand our reach and educating the market on the significant benefits, including emission reductions, that graphene-enhanced products provide.”

First Graphene says that the clinker factor of cement can be reduced by up to 20% through the use of its PureGraph additive products during the final grinding phase of cement production.

Spain: Cementos Cosmos plans to scale down the production of clinker at its Córdoba cement plant as a result as the high cost of electricity. The Cordoba Day newspaper has reported that parent company Votorantim Cimentos said that clinker grinding operations at the site will continue to ensure a sufficient cement supply in the region.

The Córdoba cement plant employs 48 people. The company is currently negotiating the situation and the scope of its impacts with the workforce.

Pakistan: Askari Cement has awarded a contract to Germany-based Gebr. Pfeiffer for the supply of three of its MVR vertical roller mills to replace the existing mills at its Nizampur cement plant. Two of the mills will be MVR 5000 C-4 cement mills with the capacity to grind 360t/hr of clinker to a fineness of 3250 blaine. The other mill, an MVR 5000 R-4 raw meal mill, will grind 520t/hr of clinker to a fineness of 12% R90µm. The Chinese contractor Hefei Cement Research & Design Institute will install an SLS V high-efficiency classifier on each of the mills. The upgraded plant is scheduled for commissioning in mid-late 2022.

Panama: Panamanian cement producers reused cooling water used in cement grinding at a rate of 88 – 100% nationally in 2020. The development is part of a concerted water conservation effort first launched by Argos Panamá. The La Estrella newspaper has reported that Cementos Panamá’s Quebrancha grinding plant reduced its water consumption by 88% in five years, to 59,600m3 from 477,000m3 in 2015. The plant’s cement now has a water consumption of 100l/t, compared to 537l/t in 2015.

India: Gujarat Sidhee Cement has shut down the kiln line of its Sidheegram, Gujarat, cement plant for 17 – 20 days. India InfoLine News Service has reported that the company will carry out routine maintenance on the plant during the shutdown. It says that grinding and dispatch of cement will continue as usual.

Global Cement Weekly celebrates its 500th edition this week. This corresponds to nearly a decade’s worth of news and comment upon the cement industry, since the first edition went out in early June 2011. Time is brief, so the quick version of all of this is as follows: China; production growth; production overcapacity; grinding; corporate mergers; regionalisation; CO₂; digitisation; and coronavirus.

Those looking for the longer version should read Peter Edwards’ review of the 2010s in the December 2019 issue of Global Cement Magazine. Although be warned, few were expecting a global pandemic to rock markets and possibly hasten future trends when that article was written. Those looking for the even longer version should read the last 10 years of the magazine and the website… and then let us know what we missed.

Looking back at the first few editions of Global Cement Weekly brings to mind the LP Hartley quote, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It’s all very familiar until one comes across the little things that makes one realise how much has actually changed.

For example, countries were imposing import tariffs on cement, companies were buying each other, national cement associations were lobbying hard for their members and cement plants were investing in alternative fuels equipment. All that stuff has been happening continually over the last decade and right into this week, with Russian media announcing who has won the auction to buy Eurocement and LafargeHolcim closing its deal to buy Firestone Building Products. Yet, Lafarge and Holcim were still separate companies and Italcementi was independent in 2011. On the sustainability side, Norcem and its parent company HeidelbergCement Group, with the European Cement Research Academy (ECRA), had just started a partnership agreement with Aker Clean Carbon (ACC) to study post-combustion CO₂ capture technology at Norcem’s plant in Brevik, Norway. Jump forward nine years and Norcem signed a deal with Aker Solutions in mid-2020 to order a full scale CO₂ capture, liquification and intermediate storage plant at Brevik.

The big numbers from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) show that global cement production grew by 24% to 4.1Bnt in 2020 from 3.3Bnt in 2010. However, the big growth had stopped by around 2013 and production has hovered between 4.0Bnt/yr and 4.2Bnt/yr ever since. Alongside this, Getting the Number Right (GNR) data indicates that net CO₂ emissions for cementitous products fell by 4% to 610kg/t in 2018 from 636kg/t in 2010. The former may show a levelling off of production as the Chinese market stabilised in the 2010s but the latter shows the progress that has been made in reducing cement-related CO₂ emissions and the scale of the challenge that remains ahead.

Graph 1: Embodied energy versus embodied CO₂ of building materials. Source: Hammond & Jones, University of Bath, UK.

Cement industry readers should not lose heart about the future of the industry though, while environmental pressure continues to mount. Graph 1 above shows the embodied CO₂ and energy of common building materials. Cement has been rightly identified as a major emitter of CO₂ but any society that desires to build strong structures cheaply and at scale requires concrete to do so whilst the data above remains unchallenged. The ratios may change, such as the perennial energy-cost influenced tug-of-war between asphalt and concrete roads, but concrete remains the only game in town. For now. At which point cement production becomes all about reducing the CO₂ emissions or capturing them, and determining who exactly pays for this. This then brings us to the present with the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme carbon price of over Euro40/t and other schemes popping up all around the planet. One echo from one of the early editions of Global Cement Weekly was the furore over Australia’s attempt at a carbon tax in the early 2010s. It was repealed in 2014.

One prediction about how the 2020s might be summarised for the cement industry is this: how to get away with pumping out all that CO₂? Let’s see what the next decade will bring.