Displaying items by tag: CO2

Belgium: Holcim Belgium is hosting a public meeting as a preliminary step towards applying for a permit to install a new kiln line at its Obourg cement plant in Mons. The line is intended to replace the existing kiln line as it reaches the end of its operational life. The subsidiary of Switzerland-based Holcim has called the proposed project Go4Zero. The new kiln will be designed to concentrate CO₂ emissions to allow for capture and recovery. Limestone for the plant will be extracted from a quarry at Tournaisis and transported to the plant by railway.

Japan: Sumitomo Osaka Cement has joined the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Decisions (TCFD) Consortium. The consortium is committed to facilitating effective and efficient disclosure of climate-related corporate information and their use by financial institutions. As a member, Sumitomo Osaka Cement will conduct scenario analysis on the climate change impacts of all its businesses. This includes its cement business, which the company says accounts for the majority of its CO₂ emissions.

South Korea: Sampyo Group has announced a planned investment of US$171m before 2030 to reduce Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions by 35% over the period from an August 2021 baseline. The parent company of Sampyo Cement plans to achieve this in the first phase by increased its use of alternative fuels, improving energy efficiency, introducing low-carbon raw materials such as fly ash and developing sustainable products. The company is targeting net zero CO₂ production by 2050.

Austria: Baumit has invested Euro5.6m in a new waste heat recovery (WHR) system at its Wopfing cement plant in Lower Austria. The producer claims that the installation will enable it to make energy savings of almost 20GWh/yr, corresponding to the energy consumption of 1000 households.

Commercial director Georg Bursik said “We have been using the waste heat for drying systems in the plant for decades. Thanks to this investment, the use of waste heat can be further increased – saving 4000t/yr of CO₂.

US: Solidia Technologies has appointed Russell Hill as its chief technology officer. He succeeds Nicholas DeCristofaro, who will retire in September 2021.

Hill joins Solidia after 25 years working for Boral, most recently as Group Chief Innovation Officer. In 2012, he led the discovery and development of a new series of ‘green’ products that opened new market segments and geography to the building materials producer. Hill holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of North Texas and is named as an inventor on 56 patents, consisting of over 20 distinct families. He is a member of the American Concrete Institute, ASTM, the American Chemical Society and Alpha Chi Sigma.

Solidia Technologies produces reduced-CO₂ concrete with lower-energy cement and water-free CO₂ curing.

Denmark: 29 consortium members, including Aalborg Portland Cement, Aker Carbon Capture and INEOS, have signed up to phase two of the Greensand carbon capture and storage pilot project. Proof of concept planning is now underway with a potential start date of around late 2021 subject to securing funding from the government’s Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program. If successful an offshore injection pilot is scheduled for late 2022.

A majority of the Danish Parliament decided in December 2020 to set aside a special funding pool to support a CO2 storage pilot project, aiming to investigate the reservoir-CO₂ interaction in the Danish North Sea. This pilot project, if designed correctly, could form the basis for a decision, to enable CO₂ storage by 2025.

Mads Weng Gade, Head of Country, Denmark and Commercial Director INEOS Energy said, “We are taking this step by step. We now have the consortium in place, and if we are successful in receiving ongoing support from the Danish Government and advisory board, Greensand will be able to take another important step forward in supporting the Danish Climate Strategy.”

Colombia: Argos North America has taken out a US$300m loan where the interest rate is linked to CO₂ emission reduction indicators and the increase in the percentage of women in leadership positions. It will be used to prepay an existing syndicated loan. The loan has been taken out from BNP Paribas Securities, Natixis, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and the Bank of Nova Scotia. This loan is the first linked to environmental, social and corporate governance performance that Argos has signed with international banks.

India: Holcim subsidiary ACC has signed the Business Ambition for 1.5°C pledge and joined the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Race to Zero campaign. The producer partnered with CDP India’s Science-Based Targets (SBT) Incubator programme to develop its targets. It has committed to reduce its cement’s Scope 1 emissions by 21% to 409kg/t from 511kg/t and its Scope 2 emissions by 48% per tonne between 2018 and 2030. In 2020, the Scope 1 emissions of ACC’s cement were 493kg/t.

CDP India executive director Shankar Venkateswaran said, “CDP India’s SBT Incubator supports companies in India to align with these targets. By committing to science-based emissions reduction targets, ACC has positioned itself as an industry leader, showing the way for the sector’s transformation to a low carbon sustainable future. We believe that this will encourage more companies on their Net Zero Journey.”

Mexico/UK: Cemex Ventures has become an investor in Carbon Clean. It joins existing investors Equinor Ventures, ICOS Capital and WAVE Equity Partners. The companies have invested US$8m in Carbon Clean extending its US$22m series B investment round, previously announced in July 2020, to US$30m in total. Cemex’s investment is part of its strategy to achieve its new climate action goals, including being net carbon neutral in concrete by 2050, under its Future in Action programme.

Carbon Clean has developed a modular CO₂ capture and separation technology that it calls CycloneCC. As well as reducing the size of installation and construction time, it is aiming to reduce operating expenditures to around US$30/t of CO₂ at an industrial scale. In 2020, the subsidiary of Cemex signed an agreement with Carbon Clean, which allowed the companies to outline a roadmap for jointly developing and implementing carbon capture technologies across cement operations.

Pakistan: Research by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) think tank shows that the cement sector was the largest national emitter of CO₂ from coal in the financial year for 2018 – 2019. Coal was responsible for 19% of emissions in the reporting period. Cement comprised 49% of this followed by power generation at 28% and brick manufacture at 22%. The report looked at CO₂ emissions from the Pakistan energy sector. It concluded that the cement industry was often missed out in discussions about carbon emissions in the country despite its high coal consumption and the number of new plants currently being planned.