Displaying items by tag: LafargeHolcim

India: ACC’s profit in the first quarter of the Indian 2021 fiscal year (1 April 2020 – 30 June 2020) was US$36.3m, down by 40% year-on-year from US$60.9m. Sales fell by 38% to US$338m from US$544m. This was due to a 33% fall in cement volumes to 4.80Mt from 7.16Mt and a fall in cement prices.

Argentina: Employees of two companies hired by LafargeHolcim subsidiary Holcim Argentina to carry out maintenance work at its suspended 2.4Mt/yr integrated Malagueño plant in Córdoba Province have taken up residence at the Hotel Uruguay in the resort town of Villa Carlos Paz, causing the hotel to lock down because they did not have the proper certification from the Centro de Operaciones de Emergencias (COE) provincial coronavirus lockdown authority.

The El Diario de Carlos Paz newspaper has reported that the workers, from Olavarría and San Nicolás, Buenos Aires Province, planned to remain locked down in the hotel for fourteen days. Due to their lack of COE certification, Villa Carlos Paz security locked down the hotel while coronavirus tests are carried out. Holcim Argentina manager of corporate affairs Belén Dagher said, “Following our application in June 2020, the COE and the Municipality of Malagueño gave us the authorisation for the arrival of the workers. The companies hired the hotel, and negative coronavirus tests for all workers were sent to the relevant authorities.” He added, “We are making a special space for them to stay at the plant.”

Holcim Argentina is carrying out essential maintenance work on the Malagueño plant, which is scheduled to reopen in mid-to-late 2020.

UK: The British Standards Institution (BSI) has granted LafargeHolcim subsidiary Aggregate Industries the ISO 45001 Standard in Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems for its reduction of workplace risks and support of health and wellbeing at the work. Company health and safety director Mike Belson said, “Achieving this certification gives us a great sense of pride as it further shows our commitment to putting health and safety first in all that we do as an organisation. We are proud to have a strong health and safety culture, whereby our employees are encouraged to take an active role in their own operational health and safety.”

US: LafargeHolcim subsidiary LafargeHolcim US has adopted Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) to designate products’ Global Warming Potential (GWP) for easy consumer use, with third-party verification from ASTM International or the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA). Aggregates and construction materials chief executive officer (CEO) Jay Moreau said, “The growth in sustainable construction is driving demand for low-carbon building products that can transparently demonstrate a decrease in our environmental footprint. These new EPDs also push us to continue innovating as we consider the next generation of building materials.”

India: Ambuja Cement has modernised its logistics operations by digitising its supply chain to “improve visibility, deliver quality customer service and optimise cost.” The Economic Times newspaper has reported that the company has integrated all aspects of raw material, fuel and equipment supply and product deliveries on a single online platform in order to “enhance overall efficiency and productivity.” Company director Martin Kriegner said additionally that the digitisation will aid in, “fuel mix optimisation and strategic sourcing, helping to mitigate rising input costs.”

Ambuja Cement’s 3.0Mt/yr greenfield expansion to its integrated 1.5Mt/yr Marwar Munda, Rajasthan plant is scheduled for commission by 1 January 2021. The company has a master supply agreement with ACC aimed at maximising the consistency of cement supply to the Rajasthan market once the new 4.5Mt/yr plant becomes operational.

Hydrogen and its use in cement production has been adding a dash of colour to the industry news in recent weeks. Last week, Lafarge Zementwerke, OMV, Verbund and Borealis signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to plan and build a full-scale unit at a cement plant in Austria to capture CO₂ and process it with hydrogen into synthetic fuels, plastics or other chemicals. This week, Air Products and ThyssenKrupp Uhde Chlorine Engineers (TUCE) signed a strategic agreement to work together in ‘key regions’ to develop projects supplying green hydrogen. Both of these developments follow the awarding of UK government funding in February 2020 to support a pilot project into studying a mix of hydrogen and biomass fuels at Hanson Cement’s Ribblesdale integrated plant.

As the title of this column suggests there is an environmental colour code to describe how hydrogen is made for industrial use. This is a bit more codified than when grey cement gets called ‘green’ but it pays to remember what the energy source is. So-called ‘green’ hydrogen is produced by the electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric or solar, ‘Grey’ hydrogen is made from steam reforming using fossil fuels and ‘Blue’ hydrogen is similar to grey but has the CO₂ emissions from the fuels captured and stored/utilised. Price is seen as the main obstacle to wider uptake of hydrogen usage as a fuel in industry although this is changing as CO₂ pricing mounts in some jurisdictions and the connected supply chain is developed. A study by BloombergNEF from March 2020 forecasted that green hydrogen prices could become cheaper than natural gas by 2050 in Brazil, China, India, Germany and Scandinavia but it conceded that many barriers would have to be overcome to get there. For example, hydrogen has to be manufactured making it more expensive than fossil fuels without government policy support and its, “lower energy density also makes it more expensive to handle.”

The three recent examples with respect to the cement industry are interesting because they are all exploring different directions. The Lafarge partnership in Austria wants to use hydrogen to aid the utilisation side of its carbon capture at a cement plant. The industrial suppliers, meanwhile, are positioning themselves in the equipment space for the technology required to use hydrogen on industrial plants. Secondly, ThyssenKrupp has alkaline water electrolysis technology that it says it has used at over 600 projects and electrochemical plants worldwide. Air Products works with industrial gas production, storage and handling.

Finally, the Hanson project in the UK will actually look at using hydrogen as a partial replacement for natural gas in the kiln combustion system. A Cembureau position paper in mid-2019 identified that the challenges to explore in using hydrogen in cement production included seeing how its use might affect the physical aspects of the kiln system, the fuel mass flows, temperature profile, heat transfer and the safety considerations for the plant. Later that year a feasibility study by the Mineral Products Association (MPA), Verein Deutscher Zementwerke (VDZ) and Cinar for the UK government department that is funding the Hanson project concluded that a hydrogen flame’s high heat in a burner alone might not make it suitable for clinker formation. However, the study did think that it could be used with biomass to address some of that alternative fuel’s “calorific limitations” at high levels. Hence the demonstration of a mixture of both hydrogen and biomass.

That’s all on hydrogen but, finally, if you didn’t log into yesterday’s Virtual Global CemProducer 2 Conference you missed a treat. One highlight was consultant John Kline’s presentation on using drones to inspect refractory in some hard to reach places. Flying a camera straight into a (cool) pyro-processing line was reminiscent of a science fiction film! Global Cement has encountered the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles in quarry and stockpile surveys previously but this was a step beyond.

The proceedings pack - including video, presenter slides and delegate list - for the Virtual Global CemProducer 2 Conference 2020 is available to buy now

France: LafargeHolcim France says that it has “responded to the demand for low-carbon concretes” with the launch of a CEM-II Portland limestone cement product with 25% lower carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions than Ordinary Portland Cements (OPC) in its Galaxim Planet range. The new addition to the range, of which LafargeHolcim plans to produce 100,000t by 31 December 2020, contains 35% limestone, up by 23% from 12% in ordinary Portland limestone cement.

LafargeHolcim France south region cement sales director Olivier Mespouilles said, “Our goal is to offer all builders a cement offering properties equivalent to a conventional cement with the advantage of a reduced carbon footprint. This tour de force was successful thanks to the involvement of all our teams, and we are the first player in France to offer this type of limestone cement in such a volume." The cement is due to enter the market in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. From 2021 the company hopes to supply 80% of customers there with the low-carbon cement.

Zimbabwe: LafargeHolcim subsidiary Lafarge Cement Zimbabwe has reported a profit of US$178m in 2019, up by 4.8% year-on-year from US$170m in 2018. Inflation-adjusted sales rose doubled to US$919m from US$449m. Cement volumes remained level at 323,000t. The company said that it, “recorded its best financial performance in over five years. The construction of a US$2m dry mortar mixing plant was completed and installation of the equipment on site is set to be completed in the second half of 2020.”

HeidelbergCement released their sustainability report for 2019 this week. Every large cement producer publishes one but this one is worth checking out because of the company’s ambition to become CO₂ neutral. Other companies are heading the same way but few of them have such developed and public plans.

Sustainability reports are often a hodgepodge of non-financial reporting bringing together environment, health and safety, community and other topics. Multinational companies cover a wide range of jurisdictions and combining reporting in these kinds of fields can be beneficial. Typically they are members of various bodies like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or the Global Cement & Concrete Association (GCCA) that give various levels of conformity between reports. Yet, the wider focus of sustainability reports gives companies a chance to promote what they are doing well, away from balance sheets.

One highlight of HeidelbergCement’s report is its progress towards reducing its specific CO₂ emissions per tonne of cement and its recognition by the Science Based Targets (SBT) initiative towards this goal. So far it has achieved a reduction of around 22% from 1990 levels to 599kg CO₂/t (net) with a target of a 30% reduction or 520kg CO₂/t by 2030. There is a lot more going on in the report but it’s led by the vision, ‘to offer CO₂-neutral concrete by 2050 at the latest.’ It plans to achieve this by increasing the proportion of alternative CO2-neutral raw materials and fuels, developing lower clinker cement types and capturing and utilising CO₂ emissions. A focus on concrete is worth noting given the pivot by building materials manufactures towards concrete in recent years.

Back in the present, HeidelbergCement is roughly in the middle of the pack of major European multinational cement producers with its specific CO₂ emissions for cement in 2019. LafargeHolcim reported 561kg CO₂/t and Cemex reported 622kg CO₂/t. This is a bit of a moving target since corporate acquisitions and divestments can change both the starting point and the apparent current progress. HeidelbergCement’s acquisition of Italcementi in 2017 or CRH’s purchase of Ash Grove did exactly that. The other thing to consider is that these companies manufacture a lot of cement. The actual gross CO₂ emissions from a multinational cement producer are immense. LafargeHolcim, one of the world’s largest multinational producers, emitted 113Mt of CO₂ in 2019 from process and fuel sources whilst making cement. To put that into context, estimates for total global CO₂ emissions range from 33 – 36Gt for 2019. The cement industry’s entire share was estimated by the International Energy Agency (IEA) to be 4.1Gt in 2018.

Where this sustainability report starts to become really interesting is where it talks about CO₂ capture and utilisation. Its plans in this department are more mature than many of its competitors with various initiatives at different levels of development, mostly in Europe. Norcem, its Norwegian subsidiary, recently signed an agreement with Aker Solutions to order a CO₂ capture, liquification and intermediate storage plant at its integrated Brevik cement plant. The deal is dependent on government support but it’s a serious proposal. As reported previously from the Innovation in Industrial Carbon Capture Conference 2020, HeidelbergCement is actively preparing to hook up with CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure. The driver is CO₂ pricing from initiatives like the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). With the EU preparing for the next phase of the ETS and talk of the European Green Deal gathering pace, before the coronavirus outbreak at least, CO₂ prices in Europe look set to rise. HeidelbergCement is positioning itself to benefit from being the first major cement producer to head into CO₂ capture and storage/utilisation with a variety of methods intended for different CO₂ prices and regional requirements.

HeidelbergCement doesn’t mention the coronavirus pandemic in its latest sustainability report. The report covers 2019 after all, before all of this happened. These reports do include health and safety information of employees, so this may be something to look out for next year. However, Cemex did mention the coronavirus in relation to its climate action plans this week. Essentially it wants to maintain its plans as a ‘fundamental component’ of its efforts to recover from the health crisis. This chimes with media talk around so-called ‘green-led’ government-backed relief programmes. Governments are the ones who are likely to be handing out the money, probably in the form of infrastructure projects. So it’s the perfect opportunity for them to encourage change from the companies bidding for this funding. Sustainability reports and the information behind them will be a useful tool in accessing this cash.

Czech Republic: LafargeHolcim has appointed Berthold Kren as the manager of its Central Europe region. He succeeds José Antonio Prima Fernandez.

Kren joined LafargeHolcim in 2005, managing alternative fuel projects, and later became a procurement manager in Austria in 2008. He became a sourcing director for fuels in 2010 and managed the company’s energy portfolio for gas, power, solid and liquid fuels in Europe, Middle East and Africa in 2016. In 2017 he took over Geocycle's activities in India and Asia. He is a graduate of the University of Leoben in Austria, where he obtained a master's degree in engineering and environmental management.