Displaying items by tag: Morocco

Morocco: Cement sales volumes at Ciment du Maroc have fallen by 2.6% year-on-year in the first half of 2018. This compares to a decline of 2.9% in national consumption, according to local media. Its operating turnover fell by 4.2% to Euro449m. The subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement also noted that it was happy with the progress of its Nador grinding plant project.

Morocco: Cement consumption in Morocco was higher in July 2018 than for any July since 2012 at 1.3Mt, a 0.1Mt (7.8%) year-on-year increase.

The upturn was reported by local press as having been expected by cement companies, which now hope to finish the year level or even slightly up on 2017, if conditions remain favourable.

According to data provided by the Professional Association of Cement Manufacturers (PCA), 10 out of 12 regions saw consumption increase in July 2018. Increases range from 0.33% for Oriental to 40.55% for Guelmim-Oued Noun.

Casablanca-Settat still has the lion's share of Moroccan cement consumption. The region was able to absorb 282,680t, an increase of 3.8% year-on-year. This zone was followed by Marrakech-Safi, which its volumes sold rise by nearly 21% compared to July 2017, thus accumulating 180,131t.

Ivory Coast: Morocco’s Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF) has started work on a 0.3Mt/yr cement plant at Bouake. The company has acquired land for the project and is currently preparing the necessary permits to begin construction, according to the African Press Agency.

CIMAF built its first 0.5Mt grinding plant in Abidjan in 2013. The production capacity at this unit was then increased to 1Mt/yr in 2016. In late 2017 the cement producer started building a second 1Mt/yr plant at San Pedro. The latest project at Bouake will be its third plant in the country.

Mexico: Cemex’s first quarter operating earnings have fallen due to poor weather and fewer business days. Its operating earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) fell by 4% year-on-year to US$535m in the first quarter of 2018 from US$557m in the same period in 2016. Its new sales rose by 8% to US$3.38bn from US$3.14bn and its cement sales volumes rose slightly to 16.1Mt from 15.9Mt.

“Our EBITDA generation during the quarter was affected by seasonal effects, including adverse weather in our European and US operations, fewer business days and an inventory costing-variation effect. We expect the impact of the fewer business days and the inventory effect to revert in the upcoming months, while we expect most of the pent-up demand caused by adverse weather to be recovered during the rest of the year,” said chief executive officer Fernando A Gonzalez.

Morocco: China’s CBMI has signed a contract with LafargeHolcim to build a cement grinding plant near Agadir. The deal for the SSS 13 & 14 Grinding Plant EPC Contract was signed on 21 March 2018 at the LafargeHolcim Technology Centre in Lyon, France. Once operational the plant will be run by LafargeHolcim Maroc.

Morocco: Cement consumption fell by 6.91% to 3.31Mt in the first three months of 2018 from 3.55Mt in the same period of 2017. Consumption decreased particularly in the Dakhla - Oued Ed-Dahab, Fès - Meknès and Béni Mellal - Khénifra regions according to Ministry of Housing data. It also dropped sharply in March 2018 by 15.1% to 1.24Mt.

Morocco: Ciments de l’Atlas’ (CIMAT) income rose by 1.27% year-on-year to Euro51.1m in 2017, according to Le Boursier. Its sales rose by 5.7% to Euro239m. The cement producer operates two cement plants at Ben Ahmed in Settat and Beni Mellal in Tadia Azilal.

Lots of facts stuck out from the inaugural Global GypSupply Conference that took place in Brussels last week. One was that Spain exported 1.49Mt of raw gypsum to West Africa in 2016. The data point from Spanish customs popped up in a presentation by Mohamed El Moustapha, the managing director of a gypsum mining company based in Mauritania. He was using the figures to reinforce the opportunities for his company to supply the growing cement industry in West Africa. Yet the size of the market has implications for the oft-repeated claims of cement sector self-sufficiency that various countries in the region have cried out for.

Gypsum is used as a retarding agent to control the setting time of cement. It gets added whilst clinker is ground into cement. Roughly speaking, cement production requires about 5% of gypsum. So a 1Mt/yr cement plant would require around 50,000t/yr of gypsum. The crucial question for cement producers in West Africa is where is this gypsum coming from. Given that the Global Cement Directory 2018 places cement production capacity at just under 100Mt/yr in the region, this requires around just under 5Mt/yr of gypsum.

El Moustapha made out that there were no gypsum deposits in West Africa. This contradicts a study on Nigerian gypsum mining published in Global Gypsum Magazine in March 2016 estimated local reserves to be around 150Mt although to be fair to El Moustapha these appear to be relatively underused. This also doesn’t take into account sources of synthetic gypsum produced at coal-power plants although this is likely to be negligible at present.

Reserves in Mauritania appear to be much larger at 1.7Bnt. Instead, the problem here appears to be assisting the exploitation of mined gypsum by improving infrastructure and supply chain issues. El Moustapha’s company Samia reported that it exported 170,00t of gypsum to cement plants in West Africa, mainly via ship, but with a significant minority via truck overland to Mali. Another speaker at the conference from the Moroccan gypsum trader Cultura presented a snapshot of a more mature market with exports of 210,000t in 2017. However, similar issues with port infrastructure were also present. To this end the company was keenly looking forward to an upgrade project the Port of Safi due for commissioning in 2020 – 2022 that would allow larger ships to berth.

A market report on the gypsum and anhydrite market by Roskill in 2014 placed Egypt, Algeria and South Africa as Africa’s leading gypsum producers. In particular it singled out South Africa as the only sub-Saharan country producing more than 100,000t/yr of gypsum. In terms of usage of gypsum Roskill estimated that just over half of the world’s gypsum was used to make cement, followed by 38% for wallboard and plaster production and then 18% for agricultural usage. Although this compares to just over a quarter for cement production and most of the rest for wallboard production in the US, with its more developed wallboard market than the rest of the world, according to recent United States Geological Survey (USGS) data.

As the Global GypSupply Conference demonstrated plenty of raw gypsum is available around the world. However, since supply and price can vary considerably in the short term, cement producers are keen to secure steady sources. Developing gypsum sources in northern Africa are necessary to help build the West African cement industry, but the regions need to work together.

The 2nd Global GypSupply Conference will take place in spring 2020

Morocco: Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions (TKIS) has won a contract from LafargeHolcim, to supply a new 3500t/day cement plant in Morocco. The project will cover the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of the new plant. The line will be built in the Souss Massa region near Tidsi. Start-up of the plant is scheduled for the first half of 2020.

TKIS will provide engineering, procurement and construction for the entire clinker production line, ranging from raw material preparation to clinker storage, and a grinding facility for solid fuels. The main components include a 1000t/hr primary crusher, a longitudinal additives storage facility, a circular stockpile with a storage capacity of 12,000t, a Quadropol QMR² roller mill with an output of 290t/hr and a blending silo of 4600t. The kiln system consists of a five-stage, single-string polysius preheating tower, a two-pier rotary kiln and a
Polytrack clinker cooler. The line is completed by a ball mill for solid combustibles and a clinker stock with a total storage capacity of up to 65000t.

Just before the Christmas break one of the Global Cement editorial staff noticed how many solar projects have been popping up in the industry news of late. Looking at stories on the Global Cement website tagged with ‘solar’ five occurred in a six month period of 2017 out of a total of 13 since 2014. It’s not a rigorous study by any means but projects in the US, South Korea, India, Namibia and Jordan all suggest a trend.

All these new projects appear to be providing a supplementary energy source from photovoltaic (PV) solar plants that will be used to supply a portion of a cement plant’s electrical power requirements at a subsidised cost. Typically, these initiatives are preparing to supply 20 - 30% of a plant’s electricity over a couple of decades. These schemes are often supported by government subsidies to encourage decarbonised energy sources and a general trend in societies for so-called ‘greener’ energy sources in the wake of the Paris agreement on climate change.

Global Cement is familiar with this model of solar power in the cement industry from its use at the HeidelbergCement Hanson plant at Ketton in the UK. The project was realised by Armstrong Energy through local supplier Lark Energy and it provides around 13% of the cement plant’s electrical energy needs. Originally the array started off by supplying 10MW but this was later increased to 13MW in 2015. A key feature is that as part of the agreement with Armstrong Energy, Hanson receives 35% of the solar power generated for free and buys the remaining 65% at a fixed rate. Even at this rate the plant expects to save around Euro11m in energy costs over the lifetime of the solar array. In addition it will save 3500t/yr of CO2.

Most of the new solar projects announced in 2017 are of a similar scale and ambition to what Hanson Cement has done at Ketton. However, JSW Group’s plans are a magnitude larger. The Indian cement producer wants to build a 200MW solar plant next to its cement grinding plant at Salboni in West Bengal for US$124m. However, it has hedged its bets somewhat by saying that it might build a 36MW thermal power plant instead if its proposal fails.

LafargeHolcim and Italcementi have also experimented with concentrated solar power (CSP) plants for the cement industry. In 2007 LafargeHolcim and the Solar Technology Laboratory of the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Professorship of Renewable Energy Carriers at ETH Zurich started researching using high-temperature solar heat to upgrade low-grade carbonaceous feedstock to produce synthetic gas. The intention was to use the synthetic gas as a substitute for coal and petcoke in kilns.

Italcementi’s project at the Aït Baha plant in Morocco uses a CSP process that can be used with the plant’s waste heat recovery unit. Its moveable trough-style solar collectors follow the sun throughout the day to warm up a heat-transfer fluid during the day and store the heat in gravel beds overnight. In this way the CSP process allows for continuous operation over 24 hours. Before Italcementi’s acquisition by HeidelbergCement in 2016 the company had long-term ambitions to roll-out its CSP process across plants in the Middle East and North African region.

New battery technology of the kind backing the growing electric car industry may be further pushing the cement industry’s preference to PV over CSP power. The other renewable energy source slowly being built to support cement plants has been wind. Like PV it too suffers from cyclical disruptions to its power. Technological entrepreneur Elon Musk (of Tesla car fame) notably supplied the world's largest lithium-ion battery to Southern Australia to support one of its wind farms in late 2017. Around the same time local cement producer Adelaide Bighton announced in a separate deal that it had struck a deal to use wind power to part-power some of its facilities in the same region. At present it doesn’t look like solar power will be completely powering cement plants in the near future but perhaps a renewable fuels rate along similar lines to an alternative fuels rate might be a growing trend to watch.

The Global Cement CemPower conference on electrical power, including waste heat recovery, captive power, grinding optimisation and electrical energy efficiency, will return in January 2019.