Displaying items by tag: agriculture

Spain: LafargeHolcim España has announced the launch of a joint venture called ECCO2 with Carbon Clean and Sistemas de Calor. The joint venture will develop carbon capture technology for use at the producer’s Carboneras cement plant in Almería. It will then seek to market captured CO₂ from the plant for use as a gas in local agricultural greenhouses. When commissioned in early 2023, the carbon capture system will have the capacity to capture 10% of the Carboneras plant’s CO2 emissions.

UK: Hanson, part of Germany-based HeidelbergCement, has supplied basalt from its Builth Wells, Powys quarry to the world’s first CO₂ sequestration field trial in the Brecon Beacons. The trial uses local live soil enriched with basalt for enhanced CO₂ sequestration in a reforested 11ha woodland. Enhanced rock weathering takes crushed basalt, a by-product of quarrying, and applies it to the soil to capture CO₂ and provide essential nutrients to fertilise trees and the fungi in the soil that support tree growth. The building materials producer says it is a method that has been proven to be successful in sugar beet and pea crops.

Sustainability director Marian Garfield said, “Hanson is focussed on climate protection and carbon reduction, and enhancing biodiversity net gain are two of our key 2030 commitments.” She added, “We are excited to be involved with this project, which aims to determine whether basalt can accelerate the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere in the creation of new woodland and could therefore potentially play a vital role in helping tackle the climate crisis.”

Brazil: Votorantim Cimentos has said that it will end 2020 with an agricultural lime production capacity of 1.0Mt/yr, up by 25% year-on-year from 0.8Mt/yr in 2019 following a US$12.6m investment in two new plants in Itapeva and Nobres and upgrades to plants in Itau de Minas and Nobres. SABI News has reported that the expansion will bring Votorantim Cimentos’ diversified products capacity to 4.3Mt/yr. The company says that it is ‘targeting value-added products’ to insure itself against a fall in demand for cement.

Brazil: Votorantim Cimentos plans to open a limestone grinding plant at Nobres. in Mato Grosso state to produce agricultural lime. The unit will have a production capacity of 0.7Mt/yr, according to the Valor newspaper. Once the new plant is opened in the second quarter of 2019 the company will have a total agricultural lime production capacity of 4.5Mt/yr.

The initiative is part of the building materials group’s plans to diversify its business. For the agricultural lime market it is targeting Central-West, Central-North and Northeast parts of Brazil. The Nobres plant can also produce 0.25Mt/yr of limestone filler for farm use. Following the upgrade to the Nobres plant it will be able to produce 0.75Mt/yr of dolomitic and calcitic limestone. These limestone products both have agricultural applications as soil nutrients.

Brazil: Walter Dissinger, the chief executive officer of Votorantim Cimentos, says that company’s diverse geographical spread and its products protected it from turbulent markets, especially at home in Brazil since 2015. Dissinger made the comments in an interview to the Valor Econômico newspaper ahead of a company meeting to plan its strategy for the next five years. He forecast that the local cement market is likely to decline for the fourth consecutive year in 2018, with a drop in consumption of 2%.

He mentioned expansion plans in the US and upgrade projects in Argentina. Six new mortar plants are also planned over the next four years with an investment of US$30m. These units will generally be built next to existing integrated cement plants. The company is expanding its limestone business with an investment of US$54m. Dissinger added that the company’s Nobres plant in Mato Grosso is making more revenue from limestone products than from cement. The company is also cutting fuel costs by replacing petcoke imports from the US with co-processing refuse derived fuels and exploring biofuel options.

Unsurprisingly the European Commission blocked Duna-Dráva Cement’s (DDC) attempted purchase of Cemex Croatia this week. Merging the country’s biggest cement producer with its largest importer was going to be a challenge for the commission. Whereas in previous transactions the various parties offered business disposals to ease the commission’s concerns, here all they were got was access to a cement terminal in Metković in southern Croatia. And this facility on the Neretva river is currently being leased by Cemex! Clearly this didn’t give the impression of being a long term solution.

Compare this with the merger between Lafarge and Holcim in 2015 where multiple sales were proposed to make sure the deal went through. Or look at the acquisition of Italcementi by HeidelbergCement in 2016 where the parties sold Italcementi’s Belgian subsidiary Compagnie des Ciments Belges to Cementir to make the deal happen. In comparison to these deals the attempt by HeidelbergCement and Schwenk, through their subsidiary DDC, comes across as a calculated gamble designed to test the resolve of the commission. If the commission had somehow passed the proposed acquisition then the companies would have cornered the market. If it turned it down, as it has, then nothing would be lost other than putting together the bid. HeidelbergCement had its mind on bigger things as it bought and then integrated Italcementi.

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager summed up the mood of the commission: “For mergers between direct competitors, we generally have a preference for a clean, structural solution, such as selling a production plant. HeidelbergCement and Schwenk decided not to offer that. Instead they proposed to give a competitor access to a cement terminal in southern Croatia. Essentially, this amounted to giving a competitor access to a storage facility – without existing customers or established access to cement, without brands and without sales or managerial staff.”

Elsewhere, the other big story in the industry news this week was Votorantim’s decision to focus on the lime business in Brazil by adding lime units to some of its existing cement plants. Given the dire state of the local cement and construction industry, initiatives to break the deadlock have been expected. The alternative is plant closures and divestures, such as the ongoing talks by Camargo Corrêa to sell the other big local producer, InterCement. Votorantim plans to build lime units attached to the cement plants at Nobres in Mato Grosso, Xambioa in Tocantins, Primavera in Pará and Idealiza in Goiás. Unfortunately the agricultural areas of the country and ones with cement plants don’t overlay neatly. Cement production is mainly focused in the south-eastern states and Votorantim are targeting the Cerrado, in the centre of the country, for the lime business.

The scale of the project, at US$50m, the scale of the lime business generally and the addition of lime units at cement plants suggest that the pivot to lime can only be a sideline to cement and construction. Given the similarity of the cement and lime production processes the announcement would be much more significant were Votorantim set to convert clinker kilns into lime ones. A notable example of this was at Cement Australia’s Gladstone plant in Queensland, Australia. Here a mothballed FCB-Ciment clinker kiln was converted into a lime kiln in the early 2000s. At the time the cost of the conversion project was valued at just under US$20m. If Votorantim was seriously thinking of doing this at a few of their underperforming cement plants then one would expect the bill to be higher than US$50m. However, it’s early days yet.