Displaying items by tag: Government
Türkiye: Marmara Çimento has secured environmental clearance to build a new cement plant at Çiftalan in Istanbul Region. PortsEurope News has reported that the plant is associated with a US$3.08m port construction project called the Çiftalan Marmara Cement Port project. Marmara Çimento submitted plans for the project in December 2021. The planned port will have sufficient berth for two 200m vessels to dock.
Marmara Çimento says that the upcoming Çiftalan plant will supply cement for use in the Kanal Istanbul Black Sea-Marmara shipping canal project.
Romania: Holcim Romania says that it has received Euro15.7m-worth of funding from the Romanian government. Romania Insiders News has reported that the company declined comment on its intended use of the funds.
Holcim Romania controls 3.5Mt/yr-worth of integrated production capacity across three cement plants in Argeș, Bihor and Cluj counties.
India: Shree Cement has won an auction for the Chandrapur limestone mine in Maharashtra. The mine has reserves of 50Mt of limestone, and is equipped to meet the raw materials consumption of a 1.5Mt/yr integrated cement plant. The mine occupies a 105 hectare site close to the Chandrapur and Warora railheads, 200km from Nagpur. Shree Cement will reportedly consider building new sidings to connect the quarry to the national rail network.
The Economic Times newspaper has reported that Shree Cement bid to pay taxes of 27% of the value of limestone extracted from the quarry, in addition to mining royalties. The local price of cement-grade limestone was US$5.76/t in May 2023.
India: Local people have launched a protest outside Wonder Cement's Kherwas grinding plant in Madhya Pradesh. The Free Press Journal has reported that the protestors are requesting that the company provide more jobs to people from the plant's host community. They stated their intent in memoranda submitted to the plant management and the local government. Local rules require companies operating plants in the area to appoint applicants from the local community to 75% of plant jobs.
Wonder Cement is a subsidiary of Rajasthan-based RK Group.
Canada: The district council of Capital Regional District (CRD) says that it expects to resume sending biosolids to Lafarge Canada's Richmond cement plant in early June 2023. This follows a reported reduction in production at the unit in 2023 and 2022, according to the Times Colonist newspaper. The 1.1Mt/yr cement plant previously used biosolids supplied by the CRD as an alternative fuel in its cement production. However, during the current hiatus the biosolids have been sent to landfill instead.
The Richmond cement plant is the site of the CO2MENT carbon capture and utilisation project. The project proceeded to its third phase, which consists of a capture capacity expansion and the installation of a liquefaction plant, in May 2023.
Heidelberg Materials Sweden calls for faster upgrade to electrical connection to Gotland
31 May 2023Sweden: Heidelberg Materials Sweden has called for swifter action to be taken by the government on a planned upgrade to the mains electricity supply to the island of Gotland. The building materials company is planning to build a full-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) unit at its integrated Slite cement plant on the island by 2030. However, the newly approved plans to build two new electrical transmission cables to Gotland are currently scheduled for completion in 2031. The cement plant is expected to require annual electricity requirements of up to 1.5TWh with a power requirement of up to 250MW when the CCS unit is completed.
The cement producer has welcomed the government’s upgrade plans so far but has impressed the urgency of its timeline to build a CCS unit at the Slite plant. It says it is currently considering investing around Euro850m on the project. If completed the CCS unit is expected to capture up to 1.8Mt/yr of CO2. The company said that this corresponds to approximately 3% of Sweden's emissions annually.
Iceland: Sementsverksmidjan says it has offset its domestic transport CO2 emissions through an offset scheme with the government environmental agency Landgræðirin. In 2022 the subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials offset 484t of CO2-equivalent by restoring a birch forest and dry-land ecosystems.
Germany: Holcim Deutschland has commenced a carbon capture trial at its 950,000t/yr Beckum cement plant in Beckum-Kollenbach, North Rhine-Westphalia. The trial will employ amine scrubbing technology to separate CO2, which it will then seek to commercialise for other industrial uses. Holcim Deutschland's partners for the project are Technische Universität Berlin and construction engineering firm thyssenkrupp Uhde. The trial also has funding from the German government.
Indonesia: Norway-based Norges Bank has placed Semen Tonasa under observation for risk of damage to art in Leang Leang Maros Prehistoric Park in South Sulawesi. Reuters has reported that the cement producer has no monitoring system in place for its limestone mining operations near to the designated UNESCO Global Geopark. Vibrations and dust reportedly present a danger to the 44,000yr-old works of art at the site. Norges Bank holds a 1.6% stake in Semen Tonasa's parent company Semen Indonesia.
Norges Bank said "The background for the decision is the unacceptable risk of damage to prehistoric and irreplaceable culture heritage."
France: The French cement association France Ciment has announced a new CO2 emissions reduction target of 50% across the cement industry between 2021 and 2030. The new target for 2050 will be 'virtual carbon neutrality.' The Les Echos newspaper has reported that the commitments replace previous reduction targets of 24% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. France Ciment says that its members are planning estimated investments of Euro5bn towards achieving the goals before 2040. These investments will cover areas including the deployment of carbon capture. Existing public and private investments in the industry's on-going projects to reduce CO2 emissions amount to Euro1.7bn - sufficient to eliminate 27% of emissions compared with the 2021 baseline.
France Ciment’s President Benoit Pillon noted the necessity of cement in construction, and called for 'decarbonisation as a whole: less clinker in cement, less cement in concrete and less concrete in construction.' He urged the implementation of policies to secure 'decarbonised and competitive electricity.'