Displaying items by tag: Plant

India: Police have fired warning shots after protesters outside LafargeHolcim subsidiary ACC’s Sindri cement plant in Jharkhand threw stones at them, according to the Pioneer newspaper. Sub-divisional manager Satyendar Kumar’s officers made three arrests. Residents of Dhanbad district are reportedly protesting a lack of local jobs. ACC had been in talks with local people when the disturbance broke out.

Ethiopia: Denmark-based FLSmidth says that its contract with Abay Industrial Development Share Company for engineering, procurement and supervision on the upcoming Dejen cement plant is now effective. The 5000t/day plant will cost US$120m and create new 300 jobs, according to the supplier. It said that the plant will “play an important role for the development of local infrastructure.”

The supplier is responsible for design and engineering, full equipment supply, automation systems, installation and commissioning, as well as training and extended supervision. Key deliveries are due to begin in late 2021.

FLSmidth president Carsten Riisberg Lund said, “We are happy to see the contract now in effect. Following months of challenging working conditions on sites around the world, we are eager to get started on the project. This contract once again underlines our position as the preferred supplier of sustainable and productivity-enhancing solutions to the global cement industry."

Uzbekistan: TThe Ministry of Energy says that it has not shut off the electricity supply to various cement plants, as alleged within private messaging channels. It stated the example of the Okhangaran cement plant, which, during the alleged shutdown, was received a recorded 605,000kWh of power on 24 November 2020, up by 12% from its average supply of 540,000kWh/day.

The ministry said, “Anyone who disseminates any information to a specific audience needs to clearly understand their responsibility.”

Pakistan: Pioneer Cement has begun power generation at its upgraded 24MW coal-fired power plant. Link News has reported that the plant previously had a power generation capacity of 12MW.

India: Shiva Cement plans to invest around US$200m towards a new integrated cement plant in Sundergarh district, Odisha. The 1.36Mt clinker unit will also include a 1Mt/yr grinding unit, an 8MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit, 4Mt/yr crushing plants at its dolomite and limestone quarries, a connecting 10km belt conveyor and a dedicated railway siding with a 12km track to the main network.

ThyssenKrupp Industries India will supply a 4000t/day clinker production line for the project. Larsen & Toubro has been awarded the contract for civil, mechanical and refractory erection work. The unit is expected to create around 500 jobs directly and indirectly. Commissioning is scheduled to take place by March 2022.

Parth Jindal, the managing director of JSW Cement said, "The new clinker unit at Shiva Cement in Odisha will provide a strategic advantage to service the needs of our customers in the region and further strengthen JSW Cement's leadership position in the Green Cement category in India.”

The subsidiary of JSW Cement intends to use the new plant as a strategic hub to access markets in the east of the country. It is part of the group’s aim to achieve a production capacity of 25Mt/yr by 2025.

Algeria: Groupe des Ciments d'Algérie (GICA) has completed the export of 41,000t of clinker to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Algeria Press Service has reported that the company exported the clinker, produced at the Hadjar Soud (SCHS) cement plant, from the port of Annaba.

Chief executive officer (CEO) Youcef Merabet said, “Hadjar Soud cement plant, which operates two production lines totalling 0.9Mt/yr of cement production capacity, will promote its exports in 2021 especially as the demand for clinker will exceed 200,000t.”

Pakistan: Lucky Cement has placed an order for three 10MW 34DF dual-fuel engines for its Pezu cement plant in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province from Finland-based Wärtsilä. The engines are capable of operating on various fuels but will be fuelled primarily by natural gas. They have been ordered to provide additional power for the unit’s captive power plant due to an increase in cement production capacity. The orders were placed in April, August, and November 2020. No value for the order has been disclosed.

“It is important for large cement producers to have operational flexibility to run the power plant on multiple fuels in case the gas supply is interrupted, or whenever otherwise required. Wärtsilä’s multi-fuel power generating technology provides the kind of flexibility that we need for an efficient and reliable power supply. The cement plant is relying purely on the power plant with Wärtsilä gensets supplying the power,” said Syed Noman Hasan, executive director at Lucky Cement.

In addition to the engines, Wärtsilä is also supplying waste heat recovery boilers needed to generate steam required for the steam turbines for electricity generation in combined cycle mode. The first Wärtsilä engine is being delivered in November 2020 and is expected to become fully operational in January 2021. The remaining two engines will be delivered by March 2021 and will become operational in May 2021.

The cement plant already uses ten Wärtsilä dual-fuel engines in its on-site power plant. The need for the new engines follows on from an increase in cement production capacity.

US: The Portland Cement Association (PCA) has announced the winners of the 2020 Safety Innovation Awards. The awards recognise ‘creative safety-enhancing projects in the cement industry’ across five categories.

Buzzi Unicem USA’s Joliet, Illinois cement terminal won the distribution award for its barge entry ladder, which reduced fall hazards associated with unloading cement from barges. Ash Grove Cement’s Durkee, Oregon cement plant won the general facility award for its burner pipes cart upgrade, which reduced safety hazards associated with moving cement kiln burner pipes. Further hazard reductions were made by Buzzi Unicem USA’s Chattanooga, Tennessee cement plant’s finish mill access platform and the Monarch Cement Company’s Humboldt, Kansas cement plant’s noise reduction upgrade, which jointly won the milling/grinding award. The pyroprocessing award went to GCC of America’s Pueblo, Colorado plant for its semi-automated clinker feeding system, while the quarry award went to Ash Grove Cement’s Louisville, Nebraska plant for its dump box hardened material extraction tool.

PCA president and chief executive officer (CEO) Michael Ireland said, “Our industry prioritises the safety of its employees above all else. We are proud of our members’ efforts to pursue excellence in safety innovation for their company and their colleagues.”

There were mixed feelings evoked by HeidelbergCement’s good news last week that its French subsidiary Ciments Calcia is to set to spend Euro400m on a modernisation project. Sadly, this came with the bad news that the integrated plants at Gargenville and Cruas will be downgraded into a grinding plant and a terminal respectively, and there will be a review of the company’s headquarters in Guerville. All of this will cut 160 jobs but create 20 new ones.

Make no mistake, this is serious money to invest. Euro300m alone will go towards an upgrade of the integrated Airvault cement plant in the former Poitou-Charentes administrative region. HeidelbergCement didn’t say it in its press release but French press reported that the pyroprocessing line at Airvault will be rebuilt starting in 2022 with commissioning scheduled for 2025. If correct then this certainly suits an investment on this scale for a single plant. Smaller investments in the region of Euro25 – 50m were also said be earmarked for the integrated plants at Bussac-Forêt, Beaucaire and Couvrot. These are serious commitments to HeidelbergCement’s production base in France.

Generally speaking, the French cement and construction market has done as well as expected for a country forced to implement two coronavirus lockdowns so far in 2020. Half-way through the year the major cement producers were reporting sales declines of around 10% year-on-year with business picking up again over the summer. Vicat, for example, reported a 9% fall in sales volumes in the first half followed by ‘solid business growth’ in June 2020. LafargeHolcim, CRH and HeidelbergCement all reported a similar situation for their local subsidiaries.

Looking at the wider construction industry, in October 2020 analyst company GlobalData stuck by its forecast of a contraction of construction output by 11.6% in France in 2020. It noted a 35.5% quarter-on-quarter rebound in the third quarter, although it reckoned output was still down by around 5% in the quarter year-on-year, using French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) data. With a second national lockdown initiated in late October 2020, it said that INSEE expected a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2020 even with construction sites being allowed to stay open. This follows a peak of cement production above 20Mt in the late 2000s before hitting a low of around 15.5Mt in 2015 and a gradual recovery since then, according to data from the French cement industry union (SFIC).

Ciments Calcia’s upgrade at Airvault is noteworthy for the whole of Europe because it is one of only a few new pyroprocessing line projects in the last decade. The last major one was the new 4000t/day line at HeidelbergCement’s Burglengenfeld plant in Germany that was commissioned in 2018. The trend since then has generally been one of integrated plants slowly closing as markets shrank following the 2008 financial crisis, international clinker levels boomed and environmental measures tightened. Dominik von Achten, chairman of the managing board of HeidelbergCement, addressed this last point directly with the announcement of the Airvault project when he said, “This is why we focus our initiatives on the main CO₂-emitting plants in France.” The competitors to the larger established cement producers in France are certainly thinking about CO₂. Alongside the general European trend of fewer new clinker production lines has been rise in France of the smaller cement producers with grinding and/or reduced-clinker factor models like Cem’In’Eu, Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies and Ecocem. Anyone spending Euro300m on a clinker kiln spewing out CO₂ would do well to consider how much the CO₂ price might be in fifty years time.

Austria: Loesche subsidiary A TEC has won a contract for the supply and installation of a Flash Dryer for alternative fuels (AFs) in the kiln line of Lafarge Zementwerke's 1.1Mt/yr Mannersdorf cement plant in Lower Austria. The supplier said that it will complete the project in early 2021.

The company said, “Reaching high thermal substitution rates (TSR) requires firing of alternative fuels at the kiln burner. To reach a stable sintering zone for the required clinker quality a high fuel quality (high LCV, small particle size) is needed, otherwise the clinker quality may suffer or the TSR can be limited. With the A TEC Flash Dryer various waste heat sources can be used (clinker cooler flue gas, bypass gas, preheater gas, etc.). The material is dosed to the hot gas flow in the flash dryer and transported with this gas flow, while the moisture is evaporated, to a cyclone and a subsequent filter where the fuel is separated from the gas flow and on-line fed to a kiln burner or a satellite burner. In addition to the drying the lifting effect of the gas can separate 3D impurities which contributes in a further increase of the fuel quality.”