Displaying items by tag: Germany
Beumer Group opens new head office in the UK
28 April 2023UK: Germany-based Beumer Group has opened a new local head office at Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire. The previous head office in the country, near London, will continue to operate as a satellite office.
David McGarry, the chief executive officer of Beumer Group UK, said “The opening of the new UK head office reinforces our strong partnership and commitment to our customers in the UK and Ireland, this will enable us to provide an even more seamless service to support them in their continued growth investing in local expertise in the long term.”
Beumer Group sells products for conveying, loading, palletising, packaging, sortation and baggage handling.
Poland: Germany-based IKN says that erection works of a new IKN-supplied cooler are in progress at Lafarge Poland’s Małogoszcz cement plant. The Euro100m upgrade project is building a new 3700t/day clinker production line at the unit to replace the existing three lines. A new alternative fuels line will also be installed to reduce the plant’s CO2 emissions by 20% and its energy consumption by 33%. China National Building Material (CNBM) subsidiary Nanjing Kisen International Engineering was previously reported as being the lead contractor on the project.
France: Ciments Calcia has announced an investment of Euro86m to further decarbonise cement production at its integrated Beaucaire plant. The subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials has allocated a total of Euro600m towards reducing CO2 emissions from all of its operations in the country in response to a government initiative, according to The Tribune newspaper.
The current funding follows a spend of just under Euro7m on upgrades at the site, including installing a new clinker cooler that will allow for greater recovery of waste heat, and the addition of a new computer control system. Following this work, the single production line plant was restarted in early April 2023.
The next stage of investment has started with a feasibility study. If successful, a tendering process could start in the second half of 2023 with work planned to start in 2025. The company intends to renovate the plant’s electricity network, modernise the production line with a preheater and a pre-crusher and make further changes to target an alternative fuels thermal substitution rate of 75%. A third stage, involving carbon capture and utilisation and/or storage, is tentatively planned to start in 2030.
Building new buildings from old ones
19 April 2023Holcim launched its formal take on construction and demolition waste (CDW) this week with the unveiling of its ECOCycle technology platform at the BAU architecture fair in Munich. This amounts to managing the distribution, processing, grinding and recycling of CDW back into new building material products. It claims that its concrete, cement and aggregate products can contain 10 - 100% of CDW with no drop in performance.
It is hard to gauge whether this is marketing for existing operations or the start of something new. Yet, in its 2022 Sustainability Report, Holcim said that it recycled 6.8Mt of CDW back into building products and that it is on track to meet its target of 10Mt by 2025. This target was neatly put into words as wanting “to build more new buildings from old ones.” Ahead of the announcement of the launch of ECOCycle, it added that it was going to roll out its Susteno product around Europe. This product, made from 20% CDW, was originally released in Switzerland in the late 2010s. Notably, recent acquisitions by Holcim that connect to its growing focus on CDW include Poland-based Ol-Trans in July 2022, UK-based Wiltshire Heavy Building Materials in October 2022 and UK-based Sivyer Logistics in April 2023.
As covered by Global Cement Weekly in February 2023, Holcim is not the only heavy building materials company pivoting to CDW. The European Union (EU) set a 70% recovery target for it in 2020 and various cement company sustainability reports have described the region as being receptive to moves into this sector. Cemex set up a global waste management subsidiary called Regenera at the end of January 2023. This division covers both alternative fuels, CDW and industrial by-products, so it is more general than Holcim’s current effort, but it shows intent in the same direction. Cemex previously set a target of recycling 14Mt/yr CDW by 2030.
Heidelberg Materials has been working on developing recycled concrete paste and its ReConcrete-360° concrete recycling process. As of its last sustainability report, this process had been tested at the pilot scale and is now being developed and scaled for industrial application. In addition to acquiring UK-based Mick George Group in December 2022 Heidelberg Materials has also purchased Germany-based RWG Holding in January 2023 and Germany-based SER Group in February 2023. All three companies operate in the CDW sector.
The other notable contribution that Heidelberg Materials has been making is as a partner of the ‘Circular City - Building Material Registry for the City of Heidelberg’ project. When Heidelberg Materials announced its involvement in the initiative in mid-2022 it said it was the first city in Europe to apply the principles of urban mining. The goal of the project is to take an inventory of the city’s buildings and then compile it in a digital material registry. The basis for the registry is the Urban Mining Screener developed by EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency). This programme can estimate the composition of buildings based on building data such as location, year of construction, building volume or building type. Circular economy supply chains can then act accordingly when a building is retrofitted, demolished or deconstructed. So, for example, at the start of the project it worked out that a former US Army housing estate conversion site was calculated to contain approximately 466,000t of material, with about half in the form of concrete, a fifth in the form of bricks and 5% as metal.
That last example compares to a European Commission estimate that, as a whole, Europe generates around 450 - 500Mt/yr of CDW. A third of this is concrete. As with alternative fuels and slag previously, this may be money going into the ground. Recycling building materials is not new but any significant increase in reusing CDW that can reduce the clinker factor of cement (and the cement factor of concrete) offers a potentially cheaper route to building materials decarbonisation than carbon capture and utilisation/storage at current costs. Hence the continued interest.
Portugal: The first batch of clinker has been manufactured on the new upgraded production line at Secil’s Outão plant. Construction and start-up teams from ThyssenKrupp Polysius reached the milestone in mid-April 2023 after a heating period of 72 hours. Germany-based ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions was appointed by Secil to work on the Clean Cement Line project in 2020. It said it was going to modify the existing rotary kiln and preheater tower, install a new calciner and add a new grate cooler. Once finished it will produce Portland limestone cement (PLC). It is scheduled for commissioning in mid-2023.
Italy-based CTP Team was contracted in mid-2020 to supply and install a 29MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit for the project. It planned to use an organic rankine cycle (ORC) unit using a 7.2MW turbine supplied by Turboden.
Italy-based Bedeschi also revealed in early April 2023 that it was in the cold commissioning phase for a new pipe conveyor at the plant to handle different kinds of alternative fuels. The conveyor has a diameter of 250mm and conveying length of 350m and will transport alternative fuels at a rate of 300m3/hr.
Germany: Robert Habeck, the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, has visited specialist Flender at the Hannover Messe trade fair. He spoke with the company’s head Andreas Evertz about the energy transition goals for Germany and Europe, Flender's role as a supplier for the wind sector, and the importance of an energy-efficient industry on the way to reach global climate goals. The mechanical drive manufacturer was part of the government minister’s official tour of the exhibition.
Habeck said, "Discussing about the expansion of renewable energies, we usually talk about the electrical output, the production. But here at Hannover Messe, we see also the other side of the coin. A lot of the industrial production is here in Germany, or at least with German companies. And when you say the market is now swinging in and growing, that's good news." He added that “It is challenging to bring electricity production out of renewables to 80% of the demand by 2030, but it is possible."
Evertz said "Flender is a major driver of the energy transition. And this starts with any kind of materials. In drive technology, Flender not only manufactures wind gearboxes, but industrial gearboxes that are involved in the production of raw materials for wind turbines. Flender is part of nearly every supply chain."
Other recent interest shown by the German government include a tour by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of Flender’s plant in Tianjin as part of a tour of China.
Germany/Italy: Germany-based Castolin Eutectic has joined the capital of Italy-based Castolin Eutectic Italy. This partnership is intended to strengthen the presence of the Castolin Eutectic brand in Italy. Castolin Eutectic will benefit from a wider sales force and field service engineers while customers in Italy will gain access to the company’s network of technical advisors, maintenance and repair teams, the parent company’s manufacturing base and research and development programs.
Patrick Fetzer, the president and chief executive officer of Castolin Eutectic, said "Castolin Eutectic’s and Castolin Eutectic Italy’s shared values and drive to deliver reliability services and premier quality products will lead to a productive mutuality." He added, "Castolin Eutectic Italy has great success in Italy, and we look forward to learn from their expertise as we continue to grow and expand”.
Castolin Eutectic is a provider of wear management solutions. The company offers a wide range of products and services, including welding/brazing consumables and equipment, thermal spray, as well as refurbishment solutions for a variety of industries, including mining, cement, recycling, steel, and power generation.
Castolin Eutectic Italy has 38 employees and 40 sales agents. Its headquarters is in Milan. The company is active both in the industrial maintenance arena, serving business customers in steel, cement, power generation and other industrial sectors.
Poland: Lafarge Cement Polska has signed a 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with KGAL Investment Management. The KGAL ESPF 4 renewable energy fund will provide the cement producer with around 230GWh/yr of electrical energy from two onshore wind farms. These will be the 35MW Krasin unit, which opened in 2022, and the 27MW Rywald unit, which is scheduled to start feeding the local grid from October 2023. With this latest agreement in place, Lafarge Cement Polska will be able to cover over half of its electrical supply requirements from renewable sources.
KGAL is an independent investment and asset manager based in Germany. It focuses its investments in real estate, sustainable infrastructure and aviation sectors.
Image credit: KGAL GmbH & Co. KG.
UK: Germany-based Aumund Group has appointed Martin Dummigan as the managing director of its Samson Materials Handling subsidiary. He succeeds Dale Lockley in the post.
Dummigan holds a master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Queen’s University in Belfast. He started his career in 1990 as a research and development engineer. Over the next 30 years he has held numerous manufacturing and corporate management positions at companies including Telestack and Terex in various countries including China, the US, Japan and South Africa. His last position was as the Group Vice President of Operations for Astec Material Solutions. He is also a co-founder of the Spadetown Brewery based in Northern Ireland.
Heidelberg Materials to install 70,000t/yr carbon capture system at Lengfurt cement plant
12 April 2023Germany: Heidelberg Materials has appointed industrial gases and engineering company Linde to install a carbon capture and liquefaction plant at its 1Mt/yr Lengfurt, Bavaria, cement plant. The project is scheduled for delivery in 2025. When commissioned, the system will capture and liquefy 70,000t/yr of CO2. Heidelberg Materials plans to use a small part of the liquefied CO2 in its development of recarbonation technologies for cement and concrete, with the remainder to be marketed by Linde to industries, including chemicals and food. The German government granted Euro15m in funding for the project under its Decarbonisation of Industry programme.
Heidelberg Materials’ chief executive officer Dominik von Achten said "We are pleased to be able to implement the world's first carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) project in the cement industry on an industrial scale.”
Linde’s executive vice president Jürgen Nowicki said “With this joint venture, two companies that are world leaders in their field are combining their skills with the aim of finding a solution that is as sustainable as it is economical. After successful pilot applications, this large-scale plant paves the way for sustainable cement production.”
Image credit: Cement plant Lengfurt, Germany. Copyright: Heidelberg Materials. Photographer: Steffen Fuchs.