Displaying items by tag: Morocco

Morocco: LafargeHolcim has inaugurated a new Construction Development Lab (CDL) in Casablanca. The CDL will be dedicated to the Moroccan and African construction markets and it will help the group develop construction solutions for the markets it serves. The laboratory is LafargeHolcim’s eighth laboratory in the world after those in Algeria, Argentina, China, France, India, Malaysia and Mexico. The 4000m² facility will house 50 engineers, architects and technicians and marketers. LafargeHolcim’s central research and development site is based in Lyon, France.

The new CDL will also aim to develop partnerships with start-ups, universities and other higher education institutions to promote research and development, test new ideas and reinforce relationships with building and infrastructure construction experts. It will organise specialised training for clients, influencers, product applicators and builders to enable them to use innovative solutions in their projects.

Morocco: LafargeHolcim Morocco plans to build two new cement plants at Tizgilt, Chtouka Ait-Baha and Tidmi, Taroudant in the Souss-Massa region. The project is budgeted at Euro720m and it is expected to create 1400 jobs, according to the Challenge newspaper. Marcel Kobuz, the chief executive officer for the cement producer, has met with region head Zineb El Adaoui to discuss the initiatives including the allocation of land.

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.

Morocco: Cement consumption has fallen by year-on-year 0.7% to 14.1Mt in 2016 from 14.3Mt in 2015. Data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Policy shows that particular falls in consumption of nearly 10% were recorded in the Béni Mellal – Khénifra and Drâa – Tafilalet regions. However, the country’s Dakhla - Oued Ed-Dahab region in the south-west reported a 64.3% rise in sales to 63,771t.

Ghana: President John Dramani Mahama has inaugurated a 1Mt/yr cement plant in Tema on behalf of Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF), a subsidiary of Morocco’s Addoha Group. The project had an investment of Euro60m according to the Ghana News Agency. Construction started in 2014.

Morocco’s Directorate of Financial Studies and Forecasting has reported that cement sales rose by 8.4% year-on-year in October 2016. It's good news for a local cement industry that saw its sales fall from 16.1Mt in 2011 to a low of 14.1Mt in 2014. Sales picked up slightly in 2015 and it looks like the same is going to happen again in 2016. Data from the Moroccan Cement Association (APC) support this with consumption of cement very slightly higher for the first nine month for 2016. Good sales figures in October can only help.

Graph 1: Cement consumption for the first nine months of the year, 2013 – 2016. Source: L’Association Professionnelle des Cimentiers du Maroc.

2016 has also been an interesting time for the Moroccan cement industry due to consequences of the merger and acquisition activity by the multinational producers that operate there. In March 2016, amidst a slew of divestments, LafargeHolcim made a point of announcing that it was holding on to its cement businesses under Lafarge Maroc and Holcim Maroc and enlarging them with its local partner SNI to form LaafrgeHolcim Maroc. The deconsolidation of Holcim Maroc picked up a net gain before taxes of Euro219m for a total consideration of Euro463m, which should considerably add to the group’s cash proceeds.

It managed to avoid being forced to sell off assets by the local competition body when it merged in 2014 due to its relatively low stakes in its companies. Today it has a production capacity of 13.2Mt/yr from seven integrated cement plants or over half the country’s production capacity. In its annual report for 2015 LafargeHolcim said that its cement business saw its results improve, mitigating problems in its aggregate and ready-mix concrete markets. This was followed by good results in the first half of 2016. New projects in the pipeline include plans to build a cement plant in Agadir and a grinding plant in Laâyoune in Western Sahara.

2016 has also seen the acquisition of Morocco’s second largest cement producer, Ciments du Maroc, by HeidelbergCement as part of its purchase of Italcementi. It’s too soon for HeidelbergCement to have reported upon the territory in its first integrated quarterly financial report following the takeover but it did describe Morocco as a having a ‘high growth potential.’ How these assets fit into the wide portfolio of HeidelbergCement’s new production base will be interesting. Ciments de l’Atlas’ (CIMAT), the country’s third largest and local producer, saw its sales fall slightly to Euro124m in the first half of 2016. However, its net profit rose by 13% year-on-year to Euro30m.

The other story of note in recent months in Morocco has been the public outcry against a shipment of refuse-derived fuel (RDF) from Italy in June 2016 destined for a cement plant in Casablanca. The subsequent protests saw waste imports to be suspended, leading Hakima al-Haiti, the government minister at the heart of the affair, to describe the furore as causing damage to the country’s economy in the aftermath. However her opponents rallied under the phrase “Nous ne sommes pas une poubelle” or ‘We are not a trash can.’ Despite this setback for the secondary fuels market, LafargeHolcim highlighted the work its Ecoval waste processing subsidiary has been conducting producing RDF at its Oum Azza site ahead of the Climate Change Conference of the Parties held in Marrakech in mid-November 2016. Although the key difference here is that Ecoval is generating RDF from local waste streams not importing them.

Perhaps as a sign of the growth potential Morocco may hold, this week, a non-cement producer was revealed to be planning to build a cement plant at Tarfaya. Previously the company, Global Oil Shale, had intended to develop shale oil resources at the site but it has switched its plan to constructing a 1.6Mt/yr cement plant instead and hired Luis Verde, a former technical director at Cemex who has also worked for Dangote. Together with the Lafarge project in Laâyoune and the Ciement Sud (CIMSUD) plant also in Western Sahara due to open in mid-2017 it suggest that the investors smell opportunity.

Morocco: Global Oil Shale, a Finnish shale oil development company, intends to build a 1.6Mt/yr cement plant at Tarfaya for a cost of around US$100m. Previously the company had intended to develop shale oil resources at the site, according to the Challenge business newspaper. It intends to focus the plant’s output on the south of the country as well as using its position to target export markets in West Africa.

Morocco: LafargeHolcim, ArcelorMittal, Evonik and Solvay have formed a Low Carbon Technology Partnerships Initiative across the steel, cement and chemicals industries. This new partnership will look at the potential synergies that exist between the manufacturing processes of these three energy intensive sectors, and how these synergies could be harnessed to reduce CO₂ emissions.

As a first step, and following preliminary research, the innovative partnership will produce a study with the technical support of Arthur D Little to identify potential ways to valorise industrial off-gases and other by-products from their manufacturing processes to produce goods with a lower carbon footprint than through the fossil path. The preliminary research has already allowed identification of significant potential in selected trans-sector pathways.

The study is aimed at bringing a fact-based overview of carbon and energy sources from industrial off-gases (first at a European level), and evaluating the technical, environmental and economic feasibility of different Carbon Capture and Usage (CCU) pathways and their potential.

Initial findings from the first step already underway suggest that deploying cross-sector carbon capture and reuse opportunities on an industrial scale could reduce up to 3 GT/yr or 7% of global anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. Existing conversion technologies that could be deployed across the three sectors could utilise by-products in the off-gases to create building materials, organic chemicals and fuel. Increased availability and greater access to renewable energy sources would significantly boost net carbon reduction efforts by those three sectors, within a supportive legislative framework. Cross sector carbon capture and reuse should also result in job creation, to be further investigated.

The study, carried out at European level, is building the ground for similar investigation extended at global level and paves the way for identifying and assessing industrial scale projects on CCU at the interface between the sectors.

“Concrete offers the highest level of life-cycle sustainability performance and we are continuously developing new products and solutions for a low carbon society. This new ambitious partnership will support our mission to cut our net emissions per ton of cement by 40% towards 2030 (versus 1990) and to develop and further deploy low carbon solutions for the construction sector. But to make this a reality, we will need an enabling regulatory framework and support for innovation,” said Bernard Mathieu, Head Group Sustainable Development of LafargeHolcim.

Morocco: Ciments du Maroc has decided to abandon its wind farm project at its Safi cement plant. The subsidiary of Italcementi has decided to change its energy policy in response to a growing number of renewable energy projects in the country, according to SeeNews. CEO Mario Bracci said that the cement producer is considering various options including signing a deal with local developer Nareva for electricity supply to several of its sites instead of investing in a generation solution at just one site.

Ciments du Maroc commissioned its first wind farm at its Laayoune cement grinding plant in 2011. This wind farm consists of six 850kW turbines that joined an existing 150kW pilot turbine installed in 2003. A 150 kW pilot concentrating solar power (CSP) plant was inaugurated near its Ait Baha. Cement plant in October 2014. The site at Safi would have been the company's second wind farm, with a planned capacity of 10MW.

South Korea/Saudi Arabia/Morocco: LafargeHolcim has confirmed plans to divest its assets in South Korea and Saudi Arabia and to enlarge its presence its Morocco. The announcement was made as part of the release of its annual results 2015. The sales form part of the group’s Euro3.2bn divestment program

In Morocco, the group signed an agreement with SNI, its partner in the country, at the same time as the Lafarge-Holcim merger to enlarge its joint-venture by merging Lafarge Ciments Maroc and Holcim Maroc to create LafargeHolcim Maroc. LafargeHolcim and SNI would own a 64.7% stake in the new company once the merger is complete. The group expects to gain a synergy savings of Euro41m over two years from the merger.

LafargeHolcim and SNI also agreed to create a common platform in French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016 subject to regulatory authorities’ approval, customary closing conditions and the approval of the shareholders of Lafarge Ciments Maroc and Holcim Maroc.

In South Korea, the group has confirmed that it has signed an agreement with a consortium of private equity funds - Glenwood and Baring Asia - for the divestment of Lafarge Halla Cement in South Korea for Euro427m. The sale is expected to complete in the second quarter of 2016. Lafarge Halla Cement runs one 8.3Mt/yr integrated cement plant, a distribution network across the country and has around 500 employees.

In Saudi Arabia the group has signed an agreement for the sale of the Group’s 25% stake in Al Safwa Cement Company to El-Khayyat Group for total proceeds of Euro120m. This transaction is expected to close in the course of the third quarter of 2016.