Global Cement News

Togo: Germany’s Intercem Engineering has been awarded a contract by CimMetal Group to build a 2.5Mt/yr cement grinding plant in Lomé. The opening ceremony for the project is expected to take place soon and production is scheduled to start in early 2021. No value for the order has been disclosed.

The order includes a 1000t/hr truck unloading station, a 25,000t/hr storage facility for additives, a 1000t/hr truck loading station, two 50,000t clinker silos, four packing machines, eight truck loading stations, 10 truck scales and the corresponding laboratory equipment. The steel construction, the entire sheet metal fabrication, the subsystems, the electrical equipment, the complete engineering, the supervision of erection and commissioning are also included in the scope of supply and services. All of the equipment will be supplied by European manufacturers. All material conveyors have a capacity of 1200t/hr and are installed in a closed gallery to ensure dust-free transport. This was planned because of the location in the immediate vicinity of the port in Lomé.

India: Wonder Cement has launched a new 2Mt/yr grinding plant at Badnawar in Madhya Pradesh. It follows the company’s first grinding plant at Dhule in Maharashtra that was launched in mid-2018, according to the Pioneer newspaper. The cement producer plans to open a third grinding plant at Jhajjar in Haryana to reach a combined production capacity of 13Mt/yr in 2020. The new grinding units have a cost of US$112m.

US: National Cement has broken ground on its US$250m upgrade to the Ragland plant in Alabama. City, county and state officials attended the ceremony, according to WBRC. The subsidiary of France’s Vicat is building a second kiln at its 1.9Mt/yr plant in Alabama. The project is expected to be completed in 2022.

India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has started producing oil well cement at its Khelrihat plant in Meghalaya. The subsidiary of Dalmia Bharat says that it is cement manufacturer to obtain a license for manufacturing oil well cement in the north east region of the country from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), according to the Economic Times newspaper. This new unit it intended to serve markets in Assam, Tripura and Mizoram, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Dalmia Bharat has been producing oil well cement at its Dalmiapuram plant in Tamil Nadu since the mid-1980s.

Australia: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says that Barro Group’s acquisition of a 43% stake in Adelaide Brighton will not ‘substantially’ lessen competition. The ACCC examined the completed acquisition closely because the two vertically integrated companies have overlap in the market for the supply of cement, ready-mixed concrete and aggregates.

It found Barro and Adelaide Brighton will continue to face competition from Boral, Holcim and Hanson, three large vertically integrated competitors with national operations, along with a number of smaller independent competitors. The ACCC looked at competition impacts on the pre-mixed concrete and aggregates markets in Melbourne, Brisbane and Townsville, where Barro and Adelaide Brighton’s operations overlap and did not identify any areas of concern.

Barro did not seek informal merger clearance from the ACCC prior to acquiring Adelaide Brighton. However, the ACCC says it may reopen its investigation if it receives further information that alters its current conclusions.