Ivory Coast: Société de Ciment de Côte d’Ivoire has inaugurated its second grinding plant in Abidjan. The producer says that the new facility doubles its installed cement production capacity to 3Mt/yr. The Afrique Sur 7 newspaper has reported that it will create 3000 new direct and indirect jobs.

UAE: Shree Global has agreed to acquire a further 40% stake in Union Cement Norcem for US$3.95m. The deal will increase Shree Global’s stake in the company to 100%. It is expected to complete the transaction by the end of June 2022. Union Cement Norcem markets and sells oil well cement, while Shree Global’s parent company, India-based Shree Cement, operates a 4.8Mt/yr cement plant at Ras Khaimah.

US: The Portland Cement Association (PCA) has responded positively to a raft of new measures launched by President Joe Biden to aid industrial decarbonisation. The new measures include: US$8bn investment in regional clean hydrogen hubs and a further US$1.5bn investment in associated initiatives; new carbon-based trade policies; greater incentivisation for carbon capture, utilisation and sequestration (CCUS) projects; and the launch of a Buy Clean Taskforce for government procurement and two interdisciplinary industrial advisory bodies to support research and innovation.

PCA chief executive officer and president Michael Ireland said “We are pleased to see our thinking reflected in many of the actions proposed today. We are delighted the White House has recognised that carbon reductions cannot be achieved via a single industry in isolation: it requires collaboration across an entire value chain.” He said that the White House’s approach aligns with the organisation’s own in its lifecycle approach to evaluating construction materials, encouraging collaboration, engaging the workforce and incentivising private sector innovation. Ireland continued "We look forward to working together with the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality on this vital initiative.”

Uruguay: Workers at Administación Nacional de Combustibles, Alcohol y Portland’s (ANCAP) Paysandú and Minas cement plants held two days of strikes without warning in early February 2022. The La República newspaper has reported that the Single National Union of Construction and Annexes (SUNCA) called the action to put pressure on the producer not to sell the businesses to private investors. The potential buyers are reportedly planning to visit the plants.

Colombia: Cementos Argos has announced the launch of its new modular concrete solutions subsidiary Soluciones Modulares Argos. The company will produce precast concrete elements for use in housing and infrastructure construction. It aims to build 500 new homes in the second half 2022 and says that its products will halve building times.

Cementos Argos Colombia regional vice president Carlos Horacio Yustysaid "Modular concrete solutions revolutionise the execution of traditional structures and constitute a disruptive bet in construction systems technology."

Argos USA announced this week that its integrated Roberta plant in Alabama is set to produce 100% Portland limestone cement (PLC) by June 2022. As part of the transition three of its terminals in North Carolina will also switch over at the same time. The company also expects that all of its plants will convert to PLC in 2023. Cement sites including Newberry in Florida, Harleyville in South Carolina and Martinsburg in West Virginia are already producing PLC.

The change by Argos marks the latest example in an ongoing trend of US-based cement companies moving entire plants to PLC production. In September 2021 LafargeHolcim US said that its integrated Midlothian plant in Texas was preparing to convert to full PLC production and that it would be the first plant in the US to do so. It later confirmed that the plant had done so by the end of 2021. In October 2021 GCC said that its Trident Plant in Montana would fully move to PLC in early 2022. Then in November 2021 Titan America said that its Pennsuco cement plant in Florida would make the change possibly by 2023. Moving into 2022 brought the news that LafargeHolcim US’ Ste. Genevieve plant in Missouri and its Alpena plant in Michigan had each transitioned to PLC production. Lehigh Hanson then rounded up the bunch earlier this month, at the start of February 2022, when it announced that a PLC was the primary product now coming out of its Mason City plant in Iowa. It even invited a US Member of Congress to celebrate!

The current expansionist phase of PLC usage in the US dates back to late 2020 when the Portland Cement Association (PCA) launched a dedicated website to promote the use of the blended cement by discussing its applications and benefits. It then released a new environmental product declaration in March 2021 and PLC received a mention in the PCA’s Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality when it was released a year later in October 2021. Lots of work went into PLC prior to 2020 though, both by the PCA and others. The first commercial production of PLC in the US started in 2005 and PLC gained its own blended cement specification in 2012. Notably, the PCA has been tracking the state acceptance of PLC by the Department of Transportation and it grew markedly during the 2010s.

The US is playing catch-up with PLC. In Europe its usage dates back to the 1960s. Cembureau, the European Cement Association, reported usage of around 30% in 2004. More recently in 2020, the VDZ, the German Cement Association, reported a similar figure domestically with the proportion of blended cement shipments including limestone, shale and multiple additives at 31.6%. In the US it is hard to gauge the scale of the current move towards PLC by producers, due to limited publicly available data. A PCA survey reported PLC production of 0.89Mt in 2016. If all the plants mentioned above convert fully to PLC and maintain their rated production capacity that would be something like 14Mt/yr of PLC in 2023 or 11% of the US’s total cement capacity. For comparison, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported total shipments of all blended cements at 3.3Mt in 2020 and a total of 5.4Mt for the first 11 months of 2021. Plus, remember that PLC is just one blended cement among others, like those that use slag or fly ash.

Recent developments show that a large change is coming towards the US cement market in the update of blended cements. It’s been a long time coming but the last six months have seen brisk increases in PLC production at scale. The exact data is not available but one might expect something around triple the current number of production plants making PLC if the US market heads towards European levels. This rough estimate doesn’t take into account existing partial PLC production levels. At the same time the US cement sector should see a fall in its emissions due to PLC’s 10% reduction in CO₂ emissions compared to ordinary Portland cement

Russia: Soyuzcement, the national cement manufacturing union, has elected Daria Martynkina as its executive director. She previously worked as the public relations head at Siberian Cement and as an advisor to SibCem’s first vice president Gennady Rasskazov. Martynkina trained as a journalist at Moscow State University and is also a graduate from the Moscow State Law Academy.

Canada: The Cement Association of Canada has appointed Sarah Petrevan as its Director of Sustainability. She previously worked as the Policy Director for Clean Energy Canada and the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation. She is a graduate of Victoria University in Toronto.

Denmark: The board of directors of FLSmidth has nominated current vice chairman Tom Knutzen as the new chair of the board and Mads Nipper as vice chair. Knutzen will succeed Vagn Sørensen as chair. Sørensen has decided to step down as chair of the board of FLSmidth since his election in 2011. He has decided not to seek re-election. Both nominations will be voted upon at the company’s annual general meeting in late March 2022.

Knutzen has been a member of FLSmidth’s board of directors since 2012 and is the current vice chair. He is also chair of the Audit Committee and a member of the Nomination and Compensation Committee. His career includes his current role as chief executive officer (CEO) of Jungbunzlauer Suisse, from which he has resigned effective end April 2022, CEO of Danisco, CEO of NKT Holding and non-executive board positions with Nordea Bank, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker and Tivoli.

Nipper is the current CEO of the multinational power company Ørsted, which develops, constructs and operates offshore and onshore wind farms, solar farms, energy storage facilities, renewable hydrogen and green fuels facilities and bioenergy plants. He brings an international background to FLSmidth including renewable energy, energy efficiency, water management and water conservation. As a member of World Economic Forum's Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, he leads the Power Working Group. He is also co-chair of the roundtable of hydrogen production under the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance and is vice chair of the international food company Danish Crown.

Thailand: Germany-based Schmersal has appointed Passara Hongwisat as the managing director of Schmersal Thailand. She has 18 years of professional experience in sales and channel management for information technology and industrial products and worked in the automation industry for five years. Hongwisat studied Electronic Engineering at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok.

Schmersal Thailand was founded in Bangkok in 2019 as a subsidiary of the Schmersal Group and focuses on sales and marketing activities to increase the supply of products for machine safety in Thailand.