Displaying items by tag: funding

US: The Department of Energy has granted Cemex funding to “research and develop innovative carbon capture technology” at its Balcones, Texas cement plant. The company says that this will partly fund an 18-month feasibility study of partner company Membrane Technology & Research’s membrane carbon capture product at the plant. It says that, if successful, the study will be “an important advancement towards Cemex’s ambition to deliver net-zero carbon dioxide (CO₂) concrete globally by 2050.”

USA president Jaime Muguiro said, “At Cemex, sustainability is embedded in our operations and we are consistently looking for opportunities to reduce our carbon footprint. We strive to develop and gradually adapt new technology which will help us achieve our ambition to deliver net-zero CO₂ concrete to all of our customers. With this grant, we will be able to leverage our expertise to define the feasibility of implementing the membrane carbon capture technology in a cost-effective manner.”

Membrane Technology & Research has supplied membrane-based separation systems to the petrochemical, natural gas, and refining industries since 1992. Vice President of Technology Tim Merkel said, “Cement plant emissions are a good target for the CO2 capture membrane technology that we’ve been developing with Department of Energy support.” He added, “We look forward to working with Cemex on this exciting project to confirm that our technology can capture cement plant emissions at a minimal cost.”

Norway: Private accreditation body DNVGL has certified Aker Solutions’ 400,000t/yr carbon capture and storage (CCS) system installation at Germany-based HeidelbergCement subsidiary Norcem’s 1.2Mt/yr integrated Brevik plant in Telemark as safe. HeidelbergCement Northern Europe director of sustainability and alternative fuels Per Brevik said, “The promising results from pilot testing in Brevik give us confidence that realisation of the full-scale capture plant will be successful. We trust that the project risk related to novel technology elements is low.”

Following an 18-month test of the partial installation, the certification ensures that the full-scale project will receive government funding.

Namibia: China-based West China Cement concluded a sale and purchase agreement for Germany-based Schwenk Zement subsidiary Schwenk Namibia for US$104m on 3 January 2020. The Nambian newspaper has reported that the deal is awaiting clearance from authorities. Schwenk Namibia holds a 70% stake in Ohorongo Cement. Singaporean authorities stopped the sale of Schwenk Namibia to Singaporean-based International Cement Group (ICG) in September 2019 due to the latter’s inability to cover the losses of the Namibian company.

Spain: Cementos Molins has obtained loans from CaixaBank, Sabadell, BBVA, Santander and HSBC to a total value of Euro180m. EuropaPress has reported that the funds, consisting of a loan of Euro40m and a Euro140m revolving credit facility, of which Euro50m will be immediately available, will be used to clear the company’s debt and for future projects. The interest will be Euribor plus 0.9%.

India: The Union Council of India has approved a US$1.4bn distress fund to help developers finish partially completed residential developments. Business Today has suggested that the financing, which prioritises affordable and middle-income housing projects, will bolster demand for cement producers. The launch of the scheme follows India’s decision not to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership on 4 November 2019, for which it stated reasons of a trade deficit with 11 of the 15 other signatories and the rejection of its proposed three-tier structure for phasing out tariffs.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates entered the world of cement this week with a public relations blitz for Heliogen. He’s one of the backers of a new Californian technology startup looking to use concentrated solar power (CSP) to power heavy industrial processes like clinker or steel production. The company says it has concentrated solar energy commercially to levels above 1000°C.

Its process, called HelioMax, uses a closed-loop control system to improve the accuracy of a heliostat system. It says it achieves this by using computer vision software to better align an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight towards a single target. Temperatures of up to 1500°C is one of its targets so that it can apply itself to a variety of processes in the cement, steel, mining, petrochemical and waste treatment industries. It says it can do this for US$4.5/MCF. Another target once it hits 1500°C is to start manufacturing hydrogen or synthetic gas fuels.

Heliogen’s press release was picked up by the international press, including Global Cement, but it didn’t mention the similar work that SOLPART (Solar-Heated Reactors for Industrials Production of Reactive Particulates) project is doing in France. This project, backed by European Union Horizon 2020 funding, is developing a pilot scale high temperature (950°C) 24hr/day solar process for energy intensive non-metallic minerals’ industries like cement and lime. It’s using a 50kW solar reactor to test a fluidised bed system at the PROMES (PROcédés, Materials and Solar Energy) testing site in Odeillo, France.

Heliogen’s claim that it can beat 1000°C is significant here but it doesn’t go far enough. Clinker production requires temperatures of up to around 1450°C in the sintering phase to form the clumps of clinker. SOLPART has been only testing the calcination stage of clinker production that suits the temperature range it can achieve. Unless Heliogen can use its method to beat 1450°C then it looks likely that it will, similarly, only be able to cut fossil fuel usage in the calcination stage. If either Heliogen or SOLPART manage to do even this at the industrial scale and it is cost effective then the gains would be considerable. As well as cutting CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel usage in cement production this would reduce NO_x and SO_x emissions. It would also cut the fuel bill.

As usual this comes with some caveats. Firstly, it doesn’t touch process emissions from cement production. Decomposing limestone to make calcium oxide releases CO₂ all by itself with no fuel. About one third of cement production CO₂ emissions arise from fossil fuel usage but the remaining two thirds comes from the process emissions. However, one gain from cutting the amount of fossil fuels used is a more concentrated stream of CO₂ in the flue gas. This can potentially reduce the cost of CO₂ capture and utilisation. Secondly, concentrated solar power systems are at the mercy of the weather, particularly cloud cover. To cope with this SOLPART has been testing a storage system for hot materials to allow the process to work in a 24-hour industrial production setting.

Looking more broadly, plenty of cement producers have been building and using solar power to supply electricity. Mostly, these are photovoltaic (PV) plants but HeidelbergCement built a CSP plant in Morocco. Notably, PPC Zimbabwe said this week that it was building a solar plant to supply energy to two of its cement plants. It is doing this in order to provide a more reliable source of electricity than the local grid. India’s Birla Corporation has also said that it is buying a solar energy company today. The next step here is to try and run a cement plant kiln using electricity. This is exactly what Cementa, HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary in Sweden, and Vattenfall have been exploring as part of their CemZero project. The pilot study demonstrated that it was technically possible but only competitive compared with ‘other alternatives in order to achieve radical reductions in emissions.’

None of the above presents short or medium-term reasons for the cement industry to switch to solar power in bulk but it clearly deserves more research and, critically, funding. One particular strand to pull out here about using non-fossil fuel powered clinker production systems is that it produces purer process CO₂ emissions. Mounting carbon taxes could gradually force cement plants to capture their CO₂ but once the various technologies above become sufficiently mature they could bring this about sooner and potentially at a lower cost. In the meantime the more billionaires who take an interest in cement production the better.

Dalmia Cement threw down the gauntlet this week with the announcement of a large-scale carbon capture unit (CCU) at one of its plants in Tamil Nadu, India. An agreement has been signed with UK-based Carbon Clean Solutions Limited (CCSL) to use its technology in building a 0.5Mt/yr CCU. The partnership will explore how CO₂ from the plant can be used, including direct sales to other industries and using the CO₂ as a precursor in manufacturing chemicals. No exact completion date or budget has been disclosed.

The move is a serious declaration of intent from the Indian cement producer towards its aim of becoming carbon neutral by 2040. Dalmia has been pushing its sustainability ‘journey’ for several years now hitting targets such as reaching 6Mt of alternative raw materials usage in its 2018 financial year and reaching a clinker factor of 63% at the same time. In an article in the November 2018 issue of Global Cement Magazine it said it had achieved CO₂ emissions of 526kg/t from its cement production compared to 578kg/t from other Indian members of the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI). In its eastern operations it had gone further to reach 400kg/t.

Using CCU is the next step to this progression but Dalmia’s approach is not without its caveats. Firstly, despite the size of the proposed project it is still being described as a ‘large-scale demonstration.’ Secondly, the destination of all that captured CO₂, as mentioned above, is still being considered. CCSL uses a post-combustion capture method that captures flue gas CO₂ and then combines the use of a proprietary solvent with a heat integration step. Where the capture CO₂ goes is vital because if it can’t be sold or utilised in some other way then it needs to be stored, putting up the price. Technology provider CCSL reckons that its CDRMax process has a CO₂ capture price tag of US$40/t but it is unclear whether this includes utilisation sales of CO₂ or not.

The process is along similar lines to the Skyonic SkyMine (see Global Cement Magazine, May 2015) CCU that was completed in 2015 at the Capitol Cement plant in San Antonio, Texas in the US. However, that post-combustion capture project was aiming for 75,000t/yr of CO₂. Dalmia and CCSL’s attempt is six times greater.

Meanwhile, Cembureau, the European cement association, joined a group of industrial organisations in lobbying the European Union (EU) on the Horizon Europe programme. It wants the budget to be raised to at least Euro120m with at least 60% to be dedicated to the ‘Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness’ pillar. This is relevant in a discussion on industrial CO₂ emissions reduction because the scheme has been supporting various European cement industry projects, including HeidelbergCement’s work with the Low Emissions Intensity Lime And Cement (LEILAC) consortium and Calix at its Lixhe plant in Belgium and its pilots in Norway. As these projects and others reach industrial scale testing they need this money.

These recent developments provide hope for the future of the cement industry. Producers and their associations are engaging with the climate change agenda and taking action. Legislators and governments need to work with the cement sector to speed up this process and ensure that the industry is able to cut its CO₂ emissions while continuing to manufacture the materials necessary to build things. Projects like this latest from Dalmia Cement are overdue, but are very encouraging.

UK: A consortium comprising Aggregate Industries, Innovatium and the University of Birmingham has gained funding from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to test a liquid air energy storage (LAES) energy efficiency technology under the government’s Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator (IEEA) programme. The IEEA programme, administered by the Carbon Trust on behalf of BEIS, will provide nearly Euro0.4m towards delivering a new compressed air system utilising LAES technology from initial laboratory testing to full operation at Aggregate Industries’ Bardon Hill quarry in Leicestershire.

PRISMA (Peak Reduction by Integrated Storage and Management of Air) by Innovatium is a LAES technology that stores energy in liquid air form to provide compressed air, allowing inefficient partially loaded, variable-demand compressors to be turned off, thus improving the total system efficiency by up to 57%. The PRISMA system will bring together a latent energy cold storage tank, filled with a phase change material (PCM) to store thermal energy, and a number of other off-the-shelf components to form a system that will work with Aggregate Industries’ existing compressed air network. The research group says that the integration of the equipment and components in an industrial setting, for the provision of compressed air, has never been attempted before.

“The project will help to address the ‘energy trilemma’ of managing energy efficiency, energy cost and energy security by: significantly improving the energy efficiency of our compressed air system; managing electricity costs by running the compressors out-of-hours, when electricity is cheaper; and helping to smooth and reduce the peak electrical demand on site. We are therefore very excited to be the first industrial partner to install the PRISMA system at our Bardon Hill quarry in Leicestershire,” said Richard Eaton, Energy Manager at Aggregate Industries.

The 24-month project will involve the development of the PCM at the University of Birmingham’s School of Chemical Engineering as well as the design, manufacture and assembly of multiple system components by Innovatium before installation of the system at Bardon Hill. The PRISMA Project has currently only been deployed in a simulated environment. Following successful delivery of the project, this scalable technology has multi-sectoral applications for compressed air systems both in the UK and globally. In the UK, the compressed air market is estimated at 1.3GW of installed electrical capacity across around 4500 sites and over 55,000 individual compressor units.

Nepal: A consortium of Nepal’s five commercial banks has approved credit worth US$140.5m to Hongshi Shivam Cement Private Limited, a Nepal-China joint venture company, in one of the largest ever finance pledges by Nepali commercial banks to any industry or infrastructure project. Company officials said that they would use the loan pledged by the commercial banks to start commercial production of cement at Hongshi Shivam’s 6000t/day plant.

The consortium led by Nepal’s NMB Bank, co-led by Nepal Investment Bank and participated in by Prabhu Bank, Everest Bank and Nepal SBI Bank, pledged the loan to the cement company, which has been conducting trial production of cement since May 2018.

The joint venture said that the loan was sought from Nepali banks to conclude financial closure of the cement plant. It has already received approval to inject Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) worth US$86m from Investment Board of Nepal and the central bank. The Chinese joint-venture partner has pledged to inject total FDI of US$360m, making it the largest FDI ever in the country’s cement industry.

Germany: SKF has inaugurated its new Sven Wingquist Test Centre in Schweinfurt. The unit had an investment of Euro40m. SKF says that the centre is the first in the world that is able to test large-size bearings under actual operating conditions.

The Sven Wingquist Test Centre has two testing rigs. One rig will be used for testing bearings used in other industrial sectors, including mining, construction, steel manufacturing and marine transport. The other is designed for the testing of wind turbine main shaft arrangements. Combined with SKF’s diagnostics, condition monitoring and simulation methods, these rigs are intended to help reduce testing and product development lead-times and provide more information into bearing performance.

The test centre has received funding from the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Media, Energy and Technology and the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Construction and Reactor Safety.