Displaying items by tag: Austria

Austria: W&P cement has launched digital tours of its Peggau, Styria, and Weitersdorf, Carinthia, cement plants using 3D photo technology. Virtual guests can access areas which are closed off during conventional tours, while integrated information points provide them with detailed knowledge. W&P Zement also offers a digital tour of one of its ready-mixed concrete plants in Gratkorn, Styria.

Sales Director Peter Ramskogler said “It was important to us to make our production facilities accessible to everyone. Especially in times of a pandemic, the virtual factory brings even more advantages. In this way, we can at least continue to offer digital tours for schools and universities - regardless of current safety regulations."

The tours may be accessed here.

Austria: Stefan Schriebl has been appointed as Head of Corporate Development for Wietersdorfer Group. He will be responsible in his new role for the sustainability and digitisation management of the company. Prior to joining the Wietersdorfer Group, Schriebl worked at the former BASF subsidiary MBCC Group in Austria as technical manager for concrete admixtures and at the refractory manufacturer RHI Magnesita as senior vice president for research and development in Europe.

Austria: Semperit AG Holding has appointed Karl Haider as its new chief executive officer (CEO). His tenure will last until the end of March 2024. He succeeds Martin Füllenbach, who resigned from his position prematurely at the end of September 2021. Since that time, chief financial officer Petra Preining and chief operation officer Kristian Brok have assumed the responsibilities of a CEO on an interim basis.

Haider recently worked as the Chief Commercial Officer at Tata Steel Europe. At Tata Steel, he had previously also led major merger and acquisition transactions and served as Director Operations Downstream. Prior to that, he was a member of the board of Voestalpine's high performance metals division, having held sales and project management positions in the group. He started his career as a chemical laboratory technician and subsequently studied technical chemistry at the Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Semperit develops and produces specialised rubber products for the industrial and medical sectors, selling them in over 100 countries around the world. Its products for the cement industry include conveyor belts. The company has its headquarters in Vienna.

Austria: W&P Zement says that it has commissioned an expanded 18GWh Wietersdorf hydroelectric power plant chain on the River Görtschitz in Carinthia. The chain consists of two new power plants and an existing one which the company optimised during a Euro12m project begun in October 2019. Together, the plants will supply 25% of the producer’s Wietersdorf cement plant’s electricity needs.

Technical director Florian Salzer said “With six modern Francis turbines, 18GWh of green electricity are generated in three power plants along the Görtschitz.” He added “That roughly corresponds to the supply for 3600 four-person households.”

Austria: W&P Zement has installed a Euro2.5m new raw materials processing plant at its Peggau quarry in Styria. The plant will introduce modern washing and sieving processes to operations at the quarry, with an additional sludge buffer for the processing of clayey material. Project manager and mining manager Jürgen Kolp said that the plant will improve the sustainability of the company’s raw materials extraction operations by increasing the limestone yield from excavated raw material.

Austria: Germany-based Claudius Peters has supplied a conveyor and silos for Schretter & Cie’s integrated Vils Cement plant in Tirol. In the first part of the project Claudius Peters Projects delivered an aeroslide conveying system from the cement mill to the existing silos, including silo bottom aeration systems. For the second part, it built a silo group consisting of three 3500m³ units with expansion chamber technology equipped with truck loading facilities. Each of the silos can be operated at a loading capacity of 250t/hr by a mobile loader with a travelling range of 10m.

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.

Russia: Cemix, a subsidiary of the Austrian firm Lasselsberger, has launched its new 0.24Mt white cement plant at Bashkiria, near Magnitogorsk in Chelyabinsk Oblast. President Vladimir Putin attended the ceremony. The building materials producer plans to distribute its products nationally from terminals at Lukhovitsy in Moscow Oblast and Afipsky in Krasnodar Krai. The company is a subsidiary of Austria-based Lasselsberger.

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.

Austria: W&P Zement has appointed Jerneja Potocnik, Florian Salzer and Peter Ramskogler as its finance, technology and sales directors respectively. The trio started their roles in April 2021. The appointments are intended to allow managing directors Lutz Weber and Bernhard Auer to focus on the development and growth of the parent company Alpacem and its other subsidiaries with respect to sustainability and digitisation. The decision is also planned to allow W&P Zement to work on modernising its integrated plants at Wietersdorf and Peggau.