Displaying items by tag: Plant

India: Adani Group subsidiary Ambuja Cements has commissioned a 2.4Mt/yr expansion to one of its West Bengal cement facilities. Reuters has reported that the move raises the producer's total installed capacity to 103Mt/yr.

Iraq: The Ministry of Industry and Minerals plans to establish new cement plants with a total production capacity of 52Mt/yr, according to Iraqi News. Ministry spokesperson Doha Al-Jabouri said Iraq’s existing plants currently produce 32Mt/yr. The strategy responds to growing domestic demand and ongoing construction projects and aims to meet future requirements through integrated plant development.

Prime minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani launched six new cement plants in Muthanna province in April 2025 worth US$1.171bn. Al-Sudani said the goal is to meet local demand and end cement imports.

They’ve done it! Best wishes are due to the Heidelberg Materials Norcem Brevik cement plant and everyone else involved. Today it has officially inaugurated its carbon capture and storage unit. The world’s first full-scale carbon capture facility in the cement industry is live.

The launch of the Longship project has been a two-day affair in Norway hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Energy, Heidelberg Materials, Northern Lights and other stakeholders. Tuesday 17 June 2025 saw assorted speakers across government and industry, including Heidelberg Materials’ CEO Dominik von Achten, talk about net zero, carbon capture, CO₂ markets and more at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo. Then the event moved to the Brevik cement plant, today on Wednesday 18 June 2025, to inaugurate the project led by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. Our editorial director Robert McCaffrey has been in attendance and a full write-up will be available in the September 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Completing the CCS project at Brevik is undeniably a major achievement. Heidelberg Materials in Norway started seriously thinking about carbon capture in the 2000s and then tested four different potential carbon capture technologies at Brevik in the 2010s. A feasibility study, concept study and a FEED study followed for the use of an amine technology approach. A full-scale capture unit on one of the plant’s two production lines was then approved for funding partly by the Norwegian government in late 2020. Technically this is a gross simplification because the project team at Brevik have worked through the technical challenges of connecting a cement production environment to a petrochemical one. 400,00t/yr of CO₂ has started to be captured at Brevik and transported by ship, as part of the Northern Lights project, for sequestration under the North Sea. Heidelberg Materials then intends to sell a net-zero cement product via carbon capture around Europe called EvoZero using a carbon accounting system to manage it. When Global Cement asked about plans for EvoZero, Von Achten said production of the product is fully sold-out for 2025. “Customers are not the issue,” said von Achten. “Property developers and architects are leading the discussion on the use of EvoZero.” The age of commercially-available cement made using carbon capture has begun.

The Norwegian government estimates that the entire Longship project will cost around Euro2.6bn with Euro1.8bn attributable to the state. The original white paper proposed to the Norwegian parliament estimated that the Norcem project would cost just under Euro400m for construction and 10-years of operation. 84% of this would be paid for by state aid. Northern Lights, the CO₂ transport and storage part of Longship, had an estimated cost of Euro1.2bn, with 73% of this funding attributable to the state. Heidelberg Materials acknowledged the scale of the government grant funding it received in its 2024 financial report. It received Euro110m in government grants in 2024 with Euro77m for the Brevik project and a further Euro21m for a carbon capture, utilisation and storage project in Edmonton, Canada.

As discussed recently in Global Cement Weekly in response to the US government cutting funding for cement carbon capture projects, net zero is a deeply political issue because governments either have to pay for it directly, set-up incentives such as carbon taxes to encourage society to pay for it or ignore it and cope with the consequences. European policy is encouraging these projects so far. However, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere in the world. And governments can change their minds. The rough figures shown above about the cost of Brevik’s carbon capture unit and the costs of moving the CO₂ onwards show how expensive this is.

From here it’s all about building experience on how running an industrial-scale carbon capture operation actually works in the cement sector year in, year out. This will be an exercise across multiple disciplines including engineering, the logistics of CO₂ transportation and sequestration, dealing with state-level partners on a long-term basis and more besides. Many more cement sector carbon capture projects are following in Europe. They will all be eager to learn from the first one in Norway, from both the good and the bad. We will leave the last word to Von Achten from today’s inauguration, "Personally I love the collaboration part of it because this is a masterpiece of national, European, in fact, global collaboration… These days this is important."

India: Renaatus Group subsidiary Renaatus Procon will invest US$29m in the first phase of a new fibre cement board plant in Andhra Pradesh. The facility is due for commissioning in 2026, and will have a production capacity of 60,000t/yr. The plant will supply the construction sector in southern India and export markets, supporting the group’s expansion into sustainable building materials.

US: Ozinga has broken ground on a 1Mt/yr alternative cement grinding plant in East Chicago, Indiana. The plant is equipped with a Gebr. Pfeiffer MVR5300-C6 vertical roller mill. It will produce ASTM C989-compliant slag cement and other blended cements. When operational in 2026, it will be the largest of its kind in North America, and avoid 700,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions from conventional cement production. Its location offers strategic rail, road and shipping access to large markets in the US and Canada.

East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland welcomed an anticipated 150 new jobs resulting from construction and subsequent operations at the plant.

UK: Clay brick and concrete products producer Ibstock is seeking an industrial partner for a ‘major’ calcined clay cement plant in the UK.

The group has identified a large reserve of high-kaolin clay at one of its operating brick clay quarries in central England. The site is a fully-consented quarry, with sufficient calcinable material to support calcined clay production for more than 25 years. ‘Extensive’ drilling and industrial trials have been completed to confirm the reserves and the reactivity of the calcined clay for use in low-carbon cement production.

Ibstock says that is looking at an industrial partner to collaborate on the design, construction and commercialisation of the project. It is open to exploring optimal investment and partnership models to fully realise the potential of the site.

Email Ibstock to discuss the project: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Kazakhstan: China-based Sinoma Cement will build a new integrated cement plant in the Baiganinsky district of the Aktobe region, in partnership with Kazakh investment firm Pimus Capital. The 3500t/day capacity plant is scheduled for launch in the second half of 2027. The US$200m project is expected to create 1260 jobs. It will reduce reliance on cement imports, particularly from Russia and Iran, and meet growing demand from western Kazakhstan’s construction sector. The company has reportedly completed geological work to confirm reserves and quality of raw materials and concluded an investment agreement. This is Sinoma Cement’s first project in central Asia, and it said it plans to invest in more projects in Kazakhstan.

India: GoldCrest Cement will build a greenfield integrated plant with a 3.5Mt/yr clinker capacity and 4.5Mt/yr cement capacity. GoldCrest Cement appointed Humboldt Wedag India as engineering, procurement and construction contractor in March 2025 and targets completion by March 2027. It has signed a 40-year supply agreement with Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation for 150Mt of limestone from its upcoming Lakhpat Punrajpur mine in Gujarat.

Najmat Al Samawa Cement (NAS Cement) in Iraq announced this week that its second production line was successfully fired up on 13 May 2025. The new 5500t/day line was formally announced in May 2023. It joins the existing line at the site and should bring the plant’s total production capacity to around 3Mt/yr. The plant is a joint-venture between Pakistan-based Lucky Cement Limited and the Al Shumookh Company in Dubai and its representatives in Iraq.

Global Cement Magazine interviewed Intezar Ahmad, the Director of Operations at NAS Cement, in the November 2024 issue. He explained that China-based TCDRI was the main contractor for both the original and new lines. Equipment for Line 2 was also supplied by Fives Pillard, Loesche and IKN. Commissioning was scheduled for the second quarter of 2025. This, nicely, appears to be spot on. Lucky Cement added in its statement about the new line this week that it is also building a new 0.65Mt/yr cement grinding mill at the plant. This addition is expected to be commissioned during the second half of the 2025 calendar year. Lucky Cement also operates a cement grinding plant, under a joint-venture, in Basra.

The expansion at NAS Cement is by no means the only one as there have been a number of project announcements over the last three months. Germany-based Gebr. Pfeiffer revealed in late-March 2025 that it had won an order to supply a vertical roller mill for the Al Amir cement plant in Najaf. This contract was awarded through the China-based contractor Sinoma Suzhou. Commissioning is planned for the second half of 2026. Then, one month later in April 2025, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani made a statement launching ‘implementation works’ at four cement plants in Al-Muthanna Province. This included the 6000t/day Al-Arabi Cement Plant, the 6000t/day Al-Khairat Al-Muthanna Cement Plant, the 6600t/day Al-Samawa Cement Plant and the 6000t/day Al-Etihad Cement Plant. Al-Sudani also mentioned the start of commercial operations at NAS Cement’s second line. Subsequently, IVI Holding signed a US$240m deal with Sinoma Overseas in mid-May 2025 to build a 6000t/day plant in Al-Muthanna Province. Presumably, this is one of the projects that the government highlighted. Finally, the Kurdistan Region prime minister Masrour Barzani inaugurated the 6300t/day Dabin cement plant at around the same time. This last project was built by PowerChina together with a power station.

The Iraqi economy has been doing well in recent years. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported in May 2025 that the non-oil sector experienced “very strong growth” of 13.8% in 2023. This slowed down to 2.5% in 2024 due to a slowdown in public investment and in the services sector, and a weaker trade balance. However, the IMF noted that the agriculture, manufacturing, and construction sectors had remained resilient. Non-oil sector growth is forecast to remain subdued in 2025 amid a “...challenging global environment and financing constraints.” In its coverage of the new line at NAS Cement, Pakistan Today reported that the country has a notional cement production capacity of around 40Mt/yr but that many of the older plants have suffered from under-investment. Accordingly, the domestic market is around 25Mt/yr supported by state-funded housing projects, oil-field infrastructure schemes and reconstruction in Mosul. 3 - 4Mt of this is supplied via imports from Iran and Türkiye. The newspaper also noted the risk that all these new cement plant projects may face from variable gas supplies from the government. NAS Cement, for example, switched from heavy fuel oil (HFO) to gas in 2022.

Cement sector capacity expansion is coming in Iraq following a revived local economy. Risks abound though due to the country’s economic outlook, its dependence on oil and an geopolitical uncertainty. Yet money is being spent and new projects are starting to be commissioned. Onwards!

Cambodia: Prime minister Hun Manet inaugurated a new US$250m cement plant in western Cambodia on 20 May 2025. The 2.2Mt/yr facility was jointly funded by Chinese and Cambodian stakeholders and has been built on 407 hectares of land in the Aural district.

According to the prime minister, the new plant is the sixth in the country, bringing the total cement production capacity to about 11Mt/yr. He said “These cement plants have transformed Cambodia from a country that imported 100% of cement from overseas into a country that is capable of supplying its domestic demand entirely on its own.”

He added that Cambodia exported over 30,000t of cement to Thailand in 2024. Cambodia has an estimated domestic demand of 10Mt/yr of cement to supply its growing construction sector.