Displaying items by tag: Plant
Bolivia: Ground removal work at the Potosí cement plant is expected to start in August 2017. Imasa, Valoriza and Polysius will prepare the 40-hectare site, according to the El Potosí newspaper. The plant has a proposed production capacity of 1.3Mt/yr and it has been budgeted at US$241m.
India: Birla Corporation has proposed building a US$375m cement plant at Mukutbandh near Nagpur in Maharashtra. Company chairman made the announcement following the company’s annual general meeting, according to the Press Trust of India. The proposal will now go to the company’s board for approval. The plant will have a production capacity of 4Mt/yr. It will be financed from a mixture of debt and internal funds.
Sinoma to build US$500m cement plant in Uganda
31 July 2017Uganda: China National Materials Group (Sinoma) has signed an agreement with Tian Tang Group to build a US$500m cement plant at the Mbale Industrial Park. The project is part of a wider investment package to develop the site, according to the Daily Monitor newspaper. Sinoma requires assurances from the government that the site has sufficient reserves of limestone and a research trip has been scheduled for August 2017 to survey the proposed location of the plant.
US: Roanoke Cement, a subsidiary of Titan America, has achieved its 11th consecutive annual certification in the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Energy Star certification for its Troutville plant in Virginia. To qualify for the certification the cement producer was required to perform in the top 25% of cement plants nationwide for total energy efficiency (thermal and electrical) and meet strict environmental performance levels set by the EPA.
“Roanoke Cement Company’s plant sits in the Roanoke Valley, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The stakes are higher for us, surrounded by all that beauty, to perform at the pinnacle of the cement industry in energy efficiency,” said Chris Bayne, Roanoke Cement’s Energy Manager.
Uzbekistan: President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has issues a decree detailing the construction of a new 1.2Mt/yr cement plant. The US$204m unit will be built at Bulakbashy, Andijan by 2019, according to the Trend News Agency. Shangfeng-Bridge of Friendship, a Uzbek-Chinese joint-venture, will manage the project. Investment for the scheme will come from foreign direct investment and loans, a loan from Uzpromstroybank and from Shangfeng-Bridge of Friendship directly. Tax and customs relief will also be offered to Shangfeng-Bridge of Friendship as part of the project.
KHD signs contracts in western Sub-Saharan Africa
20 July 2017Africa: Humboldt Wedag, a subsidiary of KHD Humboldt Wedag International (KHD), has signed contracts worth over Euro80mfor the supply of equipment and execution of civil and erection works as well as supervision services for a cement plant in the western Sub-Sahara region of Africa. The contracts will be booked as order intake as soon as the pre-conditions for commencing project execution are fulfilled. No further information regarding the client or the country has been disclosed.
Update on Angola
19 July 2017The old joke about buses only coming along in pairs might just apply to Angolan cement plants this week with the inauguration of Nova Cimangola’s new 2.4Mt/yr cement plant in Luanda. It follows the announcement of the start of an upgrade project to build a clinker kiln at Cimenfort’s grinding plant in Benguela. In cement industry terms for a country with a production capacity below 10Mt/yr these projects are right on top of each other!
Nova Cimangola’s new plant has been a well-publicised project internationally. Sinoma International Engineering coordinated the line for US$400m in 21 months using components from well-known suppliers. Loesche provided a number of raw material, cement and coal mills for the project, including the country’s first vertical roller mill, as well as other components and parts. Loesche’s Austrian subsidiary A Tec also got involved as an EPCM (Engineering, Procurement & Construction Management) partner.
Cimenfort’s clinker kiln project is the third phase of a process to turn its grinding plant at Catumbela in Benguela into a fully integrated unit since it opened in 2012. Earlier phases saw the grinding plant’s capacity increase to 1.4Mt/yr from 0.7Mt/yr by using a new roller press. Work on the kiln is now scheduled to start in January 2018 with completion scheduled for 2020.
If Cimenfort makes it to clinker production they will join the country’s three main producers: Nova Cimangola, Fabrica de Cimento do Kwanza Sul (FCKS) and the China International Fund. Getting that far is by no means certain as the Palanca Cement plant project demonstrates. That scheme was backed by Brazil’s Camargo Corrêa, the owners of InterCement, and local business group Gema. However, the regulators bailed out Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo, the financial backer of the project, in 2014 effectively killing it. Another project that has gone on the back burner is Portugal’s Secil’s plan to build a second plant next to its grinding plant in Lobito. Originally approved by the Angolan government in 2007 the project has been kicked around since then through various revisions to the local investment body. It was last reported as being under consideration by the president’s office of Angola in 2016.
Ministry of Industry figures place cement production capacity at 8.3Mt/yr compared to a consumption of 6Mt/yr. In contrast to this Secil’s parent company Semapa reported that the Angolan cement market contracted in 2016 by 25% to 3.9Mt in line with the poor state of the general economy, pushed down by poor oil prices. It blamed the decrease in cement consumption on a halt in public infrastructure spending and the negative effect that local currency devaluations had on clinker imports and other incoming raw materials. With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasting economic growth to pick up for Angola in 2017, improvements in the construction and cement sector are expected by Semapa but they hadn’t been seen so far during the first quarter of the year.
The government’s keenness to describe its cement industry as ‘self-sufficient in cement’ mimics calls from other African countries like Nigeria. The Angolan government banned cement imports in 2015, with the exception of certain border provinces, and this has continued into 2017. However, the ban hasn’t stopped the country exporting cement to its neighbours. Earlier this year the head of Cimenterie de Lukala in the Democratic Republic of Congo blamed the closure of his company’s integrated plant on imports from Angola.
All of this leaves an enlarged local cement industry waiting for the good times to come again. In the meantime, exporting cement and clinker no doubt seems like a promising proposition. In the middle of this are projects like those from Cimenfort and Secil that are looking decidedly dicey in the current economic environment. These companies may have just missed the bus to make their upgrades happen. Still, if they wait around long enough, their chance may come again when the market revives.
India: UltraTech Cement plans to build a 3.5Mt/yr cement plant with an investment of US$400m at Dhar in Madhya Pradesh. Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla informed the producer’s annual general meeting that the project is scheduled to start commercial production in the fourth quarter of its 2019 financial year, according to the Press Trust of India. The company also intends to spend a further US$404m towards capacity de-bottlenecking projects, regulatory requirements, plant infrastructure and routine maintenance at its plants.
The cement producer has reported its financial results for the first quarter of its financial year that ended on 30 June 2017. Its net sales rose by 6% year-on-year to US$1.08bn from US$1.02bn in the same period in 2016. Its profit after tax rose by 15% to US$139m from US$121m. The results included those of the cement plants of Jaiprakash Associates and Jaypee Cement Corporation that UltraTech acquired in late June 2017. The cement producer reported that its costs had risen during the quarter due to rising energy and logistic costs due to ballooning fuel prices.
Pakistan: DG Khan Cement’s new plant at Hub in Balochistan will officially start production by December 2017. The 9000t/day plant is scheduled to complete civil engineering work by September 2017 and then start commissioning by the end of the year, according Shajar Capital in a reported covered by the Express Tribune newspaper. The new plant is expected to support infrastructure development near Gwadar and support residential schemes in Balochistan and Sindh.
Angola: Nova Cimangola has inaugurated a new 2.4Mt/yr cement plant at Cacuaco in Luanda. China’s Sinoma International Engineering built the US$400m plant in 21 months, according to the Jornal de Angola newspaper. Investment for the project came from Nova Cimangola and Ciminvest, its main shareholder.
The new unit is intended to repalace Nova Cimangola’s existing cement plant at Kikolo near Luanda, which has limited limestone reserves. The new plant occupies an area of 700 hectares with larger mineral reserves. Following the start-up of the plant Nova Cimangola’s production will rise to 3.6Mt/yr from 1.8Mt/yr. The new plant will also create 200 jobs, 85% of which are expected to go to local workers.