Displaying items by tag: CO2

Holcim has started to unify its low carbon cement product range this week with the launch of its ECOPlanet label globally. The products are already available in Germany, Romania, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, France and Italy. The plan is to extend this to 15 countries by the end of 2021 and then to double its ‘market presence’ by the end of 2022.

The headline news is that the range will include what Holcim says is the world’s first cement product with 20% recycled construction and demolition waste. This appears to be an improvement on the group’s Susteno cement products that use fine fractions from concrete and demolition waste. This product is currently sold in Switzerland where it is advertised as saving 10% of CO₂ emissions compared to a standard cement product. Both Holcim and HeidelbergCement already sell concrete products that use the coarse waste from building demolition. Other than this, Holcim says that the range will also include cements that contain calcined clay. In June 2021 subsidiary Lafarge France announced that it would produce a cement product under the ECOPlanet banner using kaolin clay with its proprietary ProximA Tech process at its integrated La Malle cement plant in Bouc-Bel-Air.

We will have to wait and see how far Holcim goes in standardisng the range between different countries. Yet, judging from what the countries that are already selling ECOPlanet are doing, it looks like it will be a variety of blended cements. At present, for example, Holcim Germany offers four products in the ECOPlanet range. These are all slag cements, with three having effective CO₂ reductions of up to 70% and the fourth, ECOPlanet Zero, reaching 100% through a carbon offsetting scheme in conjunction with MoorFutures. Holcim Italy also launched a product in the range called ECOPlanet Prime using calcined clay in June 2021.

Incidentally, LafargeHolcim US announced a research project this week with the US Army about using demolition waste. It’s going to start working with the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center and Geocycle to look at how construction and demolition materials from military installations can be used for energy recovery and mineral recycling. Group resources at Geocycle’s Holly Hill Research Center in South Carolina, US and Holcim’s Global Innovation Center in Lyon, France will be used in the scheme.

Other low carbon cement products are available of course. Holcim is far from alone in launching low CO₂ cement and concrete products. Yet the use of worldwide brand names is different. Cemex is doing something similar with the global rollout of its Vertua concrete products. It first launched Vertua in France in 2018 before going global in 2020. Holcim started to launch ECOPact Concrete in 2019. Now, Holcim has gone further by doing the same thing with cement. Given how localised cement and concrete products are, it will be instructive to see how global branding for low carbon cementitious products helps these companies. For instance, who is the target audience? It could be eco-minded self-build customers or project specifiers or government departments or industry lobbyists. Or perhaps it is simply another marketing channel to reinforce the sector’s sustainable offerings.

The other point worth considering is when will the multinational cement producers start selling sustainable cements and concretes in less rich parts of the world? While Holcim was playing with blended cements and marketing this week, Dangote Cement said that it was ready to start commissioning its new 6Mt/yr integrated plant at Okpella, Edo State in Nigeria. Another 5Mt/yr plant is also on the way in the country from Madugu Cement. It has just signed a contract for China-based Sinoma International Engineering Company to build it. When Holcim and the other cement companies start selling low carbon cements in places like Nigeria then the rise of these products will be complete.

For more information on low CO₂ cement production read our feature in the February 2021 issue of Global Cement Magazine

World: Switzerland-based Holcim has launched its ECOPlanet reduced-CO₂ cement range in six European markets and Canada. The range offers at least 30% lower emissions than Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC). It includes one cement produced using recycled construction and demolition waste.

Chief executive officer Jan Jenisch said “Driving the circular economy, our ECOPlanet range includes the world’s first cement with 20% recycled construction and demolition waste inside, advancing our net zero vision in a nature-positive way. With the world’s population rising and rapid urbanisation, solutions like ECOPlanet are critical to enable greener cities and smarter infrastructure, building more with less.”

The group plans to introduce the range to 15 countries by 2022 and double its market presence in 2023.

Germany: HeidelbergCement has signed the Science-Based Targets Initiative’s (SBTi) Business Ambition for 1.5°C commitment and joined the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change Race to Zero campaign. The former entails a commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5°C and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Race to Zero membership entails a positive commitment to beginning the transition to a decarbonised economy before the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties in November 2021.

Chair Dominik von Achten said “As one of the world's leading building materials producers, we are continuously increasing our efforts in the global fight against climate change. We are working on all levels to reach climate neutrality – within our operations as well as through associations and initiatives such as the Race To Zero campaign. Every effort brings us closer to our goal.”

Belgium: The European cement association Cembureau says that the European Union’s (EU) upcoming ‘Fit for 55’ emissions legislation must provide an enabling regulatory framework for the cement industry’s carbon neutrality roadmap. Key issues of concern to the association are the prevention of carbon leakage, the retention of free allocation and a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) until 2030 and the need for a ‘coherent package’ to boost the uptake of low-carbon technologies. It said that the industry supports the European Green Deal and the major challenge of delivering deep emissions cuts by 2030.

Chief executive officer Koen Coppenholle said “Whilst we welcome that the CBAM will seek to bridge the widening gap in carbon costs between EU and non-EU countries, the proposed phase-out of free allocation and the absence of export rebates would cause significant risks to investments.” He added “The decision not to include indirect emissions at this stage is also regrettable.”

South Korea: Korea Cement Association (KCA) members have agreed to reduce their net CO₂ emissions to zero by 2050. To help them achieve this target, the state-owned Korea Development Bank has pledged US876m in investments in emissions reduction and green production upgrades by 2025, according to the Maeil Business Newspaper. The KCA says that 90% of local cement producers have increased their environmental, social and corporate governance investment and reduced their use of coal.

China: China National Building Materials (CNBM) subsidiary China Building Materials Academy (CBMA) has signed a knowledge sharing agreement with the Canada-based International CCS Knowledge Centre to collaborate on carbon capture technology. Their first initiative will pilot a CBMA model and front end engineering design (FEED) to a test platform with a capture capacity of around 155kg CO₂/day on an active cement plant kiln. If successful, the study may see CNBM roll out CCS across its entire cement operations.

Canada: The government has granted a subsidy worth US$20m to Svante for the establishment of a Centre for Excellence for Carbon Capture, Use and Storage in Vancouver, British Columbia. The centre will consist of a filter production plant, headquarters and testing centre. The company said that it will help in the global deployment carbon capture and storage (CCS) solutions ‘at Gigatons scale.’

“Vancouver is the Silicon-Valley of carbon capture technology development,” said Claude Letourneau, the president and chief executive officer of Savante. “Lowering the capital cost of the capture of the CO₂ emitted in industrial production is critical to the world’s net-zero carbon goals.” He added “The carbon pulled from earth as fossil fuel needs to go back into the earth in safe CO₂ storage.”

There was good news from the corporate finance sector for cement producers this week in the form of an approving statement by Fitch Ratings. It declared that it expected the sector to be able to pass on the costs of decarbonisation to customers due to a lack of alternatives. It recognised the challenges posed by regulators, investors and societal pressure but, even so, it suggested that cement was still an industry worth backing. Or at least for now. Added to this, it forecast that demand for building materials would grow to support the transition to a low carbon economy and to combat the damage caused by climate change. It did admit that the capital or operating costs required to decarbonise are seen as being potentially large, especially with uncertainty over how much governments will pay or incentivise. Yet the timescales involved are beyond the ratings agency’s ‘horizon’ hence no really disruptive shifts in producer economics are expected anytime soon.

This was obviously a win for the cement industry and its cheerleading associations led by the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), the World Cement Association and the regional associations. After all, the increasingly convergent message to the wider world has been along the lines of ‘concrete is part of the solution and you need our products because there’s nothing else.’ Good timing then for the GCCA to launch its collaboration with the World Economic Forum, the ‘Concrete Action for Climate’ (CAC) initiative. The collaborative platform is planned to help drive the industry’s journey to carbon neutral concrete by 2050 as part of the wider Mission Possible Partnership, a wider coalition of public and private organisations working on setting the heavy industry and transport sectors towards net-zero. Expect lots more of these kinds of announcements on the road to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) taking place in Scotland in late October 2021.

Fitch Ratings did point out that societal awareness was likely to accelerate decarbonisation. The sharp end of this trend was experienced by the building materials industry this week when environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion forced operations to stop temporarily at LafargeHolcim’s Port de Javel ready-mixed concrete plant in Paris on 30 June 2021. This followed a similar incident by the same group at a LafargeHolcim subsidiary ready-mix plant in London in mid-2019. Given the share of global CO₂ emissions from the cement-concrete production chain, it is perhaps surprising that climate activists haven’t targeted clinker-producing cement plants directly in the same way that they have gone after coal-fired power stations. Clinker kilns are, after all, the source of the majority of the sector’s emissions. However, blockading a concrete plant in the city may conjure up a more potent media image than doing the same to a factory out in the country.

Instead the battles with cement plants and their quarries tend to be of a ‘not in my back yard’ (Nimby) nature. Or rather ‘not in my monastery (Nimmon?) this week, with the news that a subsidiary of YTL Cement in Malaysia is attempting to evict a group of Buddhist monks and their underground place of worship from a quarry on Mount Kanthan in Perak. In the latest twist of the long running saga, the monks have hit back with an attempt to get their portion of the site recognised as a place of worship and a heritage site. Thankfully a more positive example of how quarries can fit in with the wider community could be found this week in the guise of an archaeological dig at CRH subsidiary Tarmac’s Knobb’s Farm quarry in Cambridgeshire, UK. The discovery of a Roman Britain-era cemetery with a high proportion of decapitated bodies may have been gruesome but the relations between the operator and the archaeologists were much more harmonious. Another recent example was the discovery of what may be a new precursor species of humans, unearthed at a quarry run by Nesher-Israel Cement Enterprises site at Ramla in late June 2021.

The paradox building materials producers pose to environmental activists could be summed up by the record heat wave that hit the north-western region of North America recently. CO₂ emissions, in minor part produced by the cement and concrete industries, are the most likely reason for an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as this. Yet, infrastructure such as pavements and roads were widely reported as having buckled in the heat, principally because they weren’t built for such high temperatures. They will have to be rebuilt to withstand similar temperatures in the future. Building materials can thus be seen as both part of the problem and part of the solution. Yet with net zero targets nearly 30 years away it seems likely that continued extreme weather events and their potentially lethal consequences will speed up the public demand for decarbonisation. It is worth noting here that one of Extinction Rebellion’s demands in the UK is that the country should become net zero by 2025.

Fitch Ratings has cast its vote for now and Extinction Rebellion and its fellows are set to continue to wage their political campaigns. In the meantime it is debatable how much spiritual solace will be found by the monks of Mount Kanthan during blasting hours at the neighbouring quarry.

Austria/Australia: Refractory producer RHI Magnesita and Calix say they have started a memorandum of understanding to develop a flash calciner for use in the production of refractory materials, to enable CO₂ separation for either utilisation or storage. The companies have agreed to run studies up to and including basic front-end engineering and design for a commercial-scale demonstration facility at an RHI Magnesita site.

RHI Magnesita and Calix started discussing a collaboration in early 2019. The application of Calix's technology to refractory products has been the subject of pilot scale test work during 2020, with larger scale test work currently underway.

Luis Bittencourt, chief technology officer of RHI Magnesita said, "We are pleased to be working with Calix on this project, which is a key part of the research and development programme on CO₂ emissions reduction that we are carrying out over the next five years. Together with our partners at Calix, we are seeking to develop new technologies for the capture, storage and utilisation of CO₂ that would otherwise be emitted during the refractory production process." Phil Hodgson, the managing director of Calix added that the company was also looking at strategic opportunities in its magnesium oxide businesses.

New Zealand: Stevenson Concrete is set to bring concrete made using CarbonCure technology to the country in July 2021. The Auckland-based concrete producer is currently conducting final internal quality assurance at its Drury quarry and concrete plant before opening the product up on general sale. Canada-based CarbonCure’s technology uses a CO₂ mineralisation process during production to reduce carbon footprint of concrete.

"Along with a number of other carbon-decreasing initiatives we are using, this technology is going to change the way New Zealand builds houses, footpaths, roads, pipes, and thousands of other man-made, everyday objects. Stevenson has brought it into the New Zealand mainstream, just as this technology is used in countries like Singapore, North America and parts of Europe," said Anthony Bitossi, general manager of Stevenson Concrete.