Displaying items by tag: Cementa

Sweden: 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.

Sweden: Cementa is running trials on a pilot water treatment plant in the File Hajdar limestone quarry near its Slite cement plant in Gotland. The pilot plant has been running since September 2022 and the subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg materials describes the first results as ‘promising.’ The cement company plans to build and pay for a full-scale water treatment plant at the site. Engineering and design company AFRY has been collaborating with Cementa on the project.

Matilda Hoffstedt, the manager of the Slite cement plant, said “We can contribute to greatly strengthening the public water supply here in northern Gotland. The results from the pilot project are extremely promising and we see that a new water plant would really make a difference to the water supply throughout the year.”

Cementa started work on the water project in 2021 with a feasibility study and plans for the pilot. The entire feasibility study is expected to be completed in the summer of 2023 and the goal is to be able to put a full-scale water plant into operation in 2027. However, Cementa says that it needs a long-term permit for its mining operations in Gotland in order to invest in the project. The cement producer has faced opposition to renewing its permit at the site since 2021. A perceived threat to the area’s drinking water supplies has been a repeated concern made by groups against continued quarrying in the area.

Sweden: The Land and Environmental Court has granted Cementa a four-year permit to continue mining operations in Slite on Gotland. The latest temporary permit was set to expire at the end of 2022. Both the Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket) and the county administrative board of Gotland recommended rejecting Cementa’s application earlier in 2022. Prior to this the central government extended the cement company’s mining licence by one year from late 2021.

The subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials said that it viewed the latest four-year permit as a ‘bridge’ until it is able to secure a long-term permit. It is aiming to submit an application for a 30-year permit in 2023.

Sweden: Germany-based KIMA Process Control has secured a contract for the supply of a kiln shell cooling system for Cementa's Slite cement plant in Gotland. 88 water jets will deliver centimetre-precision cooling for the 55m-long kiln, while IR pyrometers measure temperatures over areas of 10cm². According to KIMA Process Control, the equipment can avoid unnecessary cooling of the kiln shell, conserving the heat energy supplied by the main burner.

The new cooling system will eliminate the use of energy intensive electric fans, slashing 1700t/yr in CO₂ emissions, according to the supplier. It said that noise emissions will also 'drastically' decline as a result of the upgrade. The system's operating costs are reportedly 98% less than those of the plant's existing fan system.

The supplier said that the new equipment will 'bring the cement plant in Slite an economic benefit in the shortest possible time.' It said "For the cement industry, this project represents a new milestone in terms of best available technology in the operation of rotary kilns."

Sweden: The Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket) and the county administrative board of Gotland have both recommended rejecting Cementa’s application to extend its operating permit for its integrated Slite cement plant by four years. At present the current temporary permit will expire at the end of 2022, according to the Dagens Industri newspaper. The county administrative board has requested more information and Naturvårdsverket has found issues in the application with groundwater and nature protection area issues.

Cementa says that it submitted it application to the Land and Environment Court in April 2022 and that it was deemed complete by the court, which announced the application. In July 2022, opinions were received from around 10 authorities and associations, such as the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU), Naturvårdsverket and the Norwegian Sea and Water Authority. Cementa added that it has now responded to this feedback.

“There are and must be high requirements for permit applications, so it is natural that there will be many views and questions in this type of examination,” said Karin Comstedt Webb, vice president of HeidelbergCement Sweden. “We have now clarified the application further and are now looking forward to the main hearing in October 2022. We are confident that our application is complete and we have been keen to show even more clearly that the business can be conducted in coexistence with nearby residents, and surrounding environmental and natural values. We see good conditions for the timetable announced by the court to be kept, which is crucial for the Swedish cement supply not to be jeopardised in the coming years.”

Further views on the application will be submitted in September 2022. The Land and Environment Court will then hold a hearing in October 2022 and a final decision is expected the end of 2022.

Coolbrook has been in the news recently with collaboration deals struck with Cemex and UltraTech Cement. First the Finland-based company officially launched its Roto Dynamic Heater (RDH) technology with a memorandum of understanding signed with Cemex in May 2022. Then, this week, it signed a similar agreement with UltraTech Cement.

The specifics of either agreement are unknown but the target is clearly to build an industrial pilot of an electric kiln – or something like it - at a cement plant. Coolbrook says it has run a pilot of its RDH technology in Finland. Further tests are now scheduled to continue for two years starting from September 2022 at the Brightlands Chemelot Campus at Geleen in the Netherlands. Commercial scale demonstrations are scheduled from 2022 with the hope of commercial use from 2024. Links with Cemex and UltraTech Cement seem to suggest progress. At the same time Coolbrook will be testing its RotoDynamic Reactor (RDR) technology, which promises to electrify the steam cracking process used in plastic manufacturing.

Publically available details on the RDH technology are light. In its promotional material Coolbrook says that it can achieve process temperatures of up to around 1700°C. This is crucial to achieve full clinker formation in a cement kiln. Reaching this temperature with non-combustion style kilns, such as solar reactors, has previously been a problem. Notably, Synhelion and Cemex said in February 2022 that they had managed to produce clinker using concentrated solar radiation. Retrofit possibilities and compact equipment size are also mentioned in the promotional material for the RDH. The former is an obvious attraction but size of equipment footprint is increasingly emerging as a potential issue for cement plants looking to reduce their CO₂ emissions. Rick Bohan from the Portland Cement Association (PCA) presented a summary of the potential and problems of emerging carbon capture and utilisation/storage (CCUS) technologies for cement plants in the US at the Virtual Global CemCCUS Seminar that took place on 14 June 2022. He noted that installing CCUS equipment makes cement plants start to look different (more like petrochemical plants in the view of Global Cement Weekly) and that they may require more space to install it all.

Coolbrook hasn’t been the only organisation looking at kiln electrification. The installation with the most available information on kiln electrification has been the Decarbonate project, led by the VTT, formerly known as the Technical Research Centre of Finland. The project has built a pilot rotary kiln with a length of 8m inside a shipping container. It has a production capacity of around 25kg/hr. The system reportedly uses fixed radiant heating coils around the kiln, surrounded by insulation materials. Early results presented to the 1st Virtual Global CemPower Seminar in late 2021 were that the kiln started up, sufficient calcination was occurring and the system was operated continuously for three days at a temperature of 1000°C with no problems reported. Further research was scheduled to carry on into 2022 with longer trials planned for three different materials.

HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary in Sweden, Cementa, completed a feasibility study on implementing electrified cement production at its Slite plant in 2019. It then said that it was conducting further study with electricity producer Vattenfall as part of CemZero project. This consists of three projects running to 2025. Namely: heat transfer with plasma in rotary kilns; direct separation of carbon dioxide from calcination of carbonate-based raw materials in the production of cement clinker and burnt lime; and carbon dioxide-free products with electrified production - reactivity of cement clinker with secondary additives. HeidelbergCement has since announced plans to build a full scale 1.8Mt/yr carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at the Slite cement plant by 2030.

How this would fit with any kiln electrification plans is unknown. However, one attraction of moving to an electrical kiln, for all of the projects above, is to cut out the 40 – 50% of a cement plant’s CO₂ emissions that arise from the fuel that is burnt. Taking a kiln electric also makes CO₂ capture easier. Much of the remainder of the CO₂ released comes from the decomposition of limestone during calcination when clinker is created. Substitute out fossil or alternative fuels and the flue gas becomes much purer CO₂.

It is early days for cement kiln electrification but progress is happening both commercially and scientifically. The next step to watch out for will be the first pilot installation at a cement plant. One point to finish with is a comment that Rick Bohan made at the IEEE-IAS/PCA Cement Industry Technical Conference that took place in May 2022: carbon capture is expected to double a cement plant’s energy consumption. Kiln electrification is one potential route for cement production to reach net zero. CCUS is another. If one or both occur then a low carbon future could be a high energy one also.

Watch out for Global Cement’s forthcoming interview with Coolbrook in the September 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine

For more on CCUS, download the proceedings pack for the Virtual Global CemCCUS Seminar 2022

For more on Synhelion and Cemex read the interview in the December 2020 issue of Global Cement Magazine interview

Sweden: HeidelbergCement says that it will establish a 1.8Mt/yr carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at its Slite cement plant in Gotland. It aims to achieve full-scale capture of the plant’s CO₂ emissions by 2030. In conjunction with the CCS plant project, Cementa will increase the share of biomass in the Slite plant’s fuel mix.

Chair Dominik von Achten said “Just a few days ago, we published new sustainability targets, underlining the importance of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) as one key lever to almost halve our CO₂ footprint by 2030 compared to 1990, and achieve Net Zero by 2050 at the latest.” He continued “Slite CCS is the largest CCUS project yet in our group and the cement industry, and a model for what will be achievable with CCUS also beyond 2030. As this initiative contributes considerably to the climate ambitions of Sweden, and is a unique project for us in terms of scale, we are keen to make it happen.”

Sweden: Cementa has completed its feasibility study for a carbon capture and storage (CCS) system at Slite cement plant in Gotland. The producer says that it will now proceed to the next stage of the project, with the aim of producing climate positive cement from 2030. Sister company Norcem is currently building a 400,000t/yr CCS system at its Brevik cement plant in Norway. Cementa says that its new system will have four times the capacity of that at the Brevik plant, and reduce Sweden's total CO₂ emissions by 3%. One or more of 'several storage solutions' currently under development in the North Sea will serve to store the plant's captured CO₂ emissions.

General manager Giv Brantenberg said "With the knowledge we have built up through our pioneering project at Norcem in Brevik, we now have a good picture of how to move forward in Sweden. The Nordic countries have what it takes to lead the climate transition in the construction sector."

Sweden: The government has extended Cementa’s permit to continue mining limestone at the quarries supporting its Slite cement plant for just over one year until the end of December 2022. The cement producer said that it would restart its mining activity immediately. However, it warned that the decision could still be appealed and work stopped whilst the case was pending. The subsidiary of Germany-based HeidelbergCement also refused to rule out shortages of cement in the future due to general uncertainty with the situation. Cementa has now started applying for a three to four year mining permit at the site.

Sweden: Cementa says it is preparing to ration deliveries of cement in December 2021 due to uncertainty about whether it can renew the mining licence at its integrated Slite plant in Gotland beyond the end of October 2021. The subsidiary of Germany-based HeidelbergCement has warned customers that it is preparing to implement quotas of cement products from its two plants and five terminals on a week-by-week basis. The quotas will be based on what level of cement customers have ordered previously over the past 36 months. It will also take into account whether there have been significant volume changes during the period.

Cementa says it submitted its application for an emergency permit in late September 2021. It needs approval from the government by mid-November 2021 to avoid a potential cement shortage. However, any such approval may be subject to an appeal leading to further delays in mining.