Displaying items by tag: Closure

Argentina: Loma Negra has converted its 0.2Mt/yr San Juan integrated cement plant to grinding and bagging only. 14 people have resultantly lost their jobs, five of whom have accepted relocation to the company’s Catamarca plant. Catamarca is the largest of Loma Negra’s seven production facilities in Argentina, with a cement production capacity of 1.8Mt/yr.

Brazil: InterCement is to stop production at its integrated Pedro Leopoldo plant in Minas Gerais. It plans to temporarily run the unit as a cement terminal, according to Por Dentro De Tudo. The plant has 53 employees. 28 will be relocated to other plants in the company and the remaining 25 will be made redundant.

Argentina: Loma Negra has signed an agreement with the Asociación Obrera Minera Argentina (AOMA) union and the government to keep the Barker cement plant open. The deal follows three months of negotiations, according to La Nacion newspaper. The cement producer wanted to reduce the number of shifts at the grinding plant. It previously said it had started to close the plant in early-June 2019. The plant will continue to operate with 160 staff working a reduced workload amongst other concessions.

Egypt: Tourah Cement says it has stopped production due to a financial crisis caused by oversupply in the local market. Jose Maria Magrina, the managing director of Tourah Cement, told employees in mid-June 2019 that production would be stopped temporarily as it couldn’t cover its costs, according to Mist News. Estimated national cement consumption is 50Mt/yr but total production capcaity is 85Mt/yr.

In a statement the subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement said that new plants had forced producers to lower prices below the cost of production. It has also blamed higher fuel prices due to a cut in government subsidies.

Argentina: Loma Negra says it has started to close its Barker cement plant because it has been unable to reach an agreement with the union over staff redundancies. The company alleges that the union would not accept its plans to convert the unit into a grinding and bagging plant, according to El Cronista newspaper. The plant will now move to a single shift of operation with 24 employees whilst plans for its final closure are implemented.

Mozambique: Cimentos de Mocambique has closed its Matola plant due to low demand. It made the decision following large losses, according to the O Pais newspaper. The subsidiary of Brazil’s Intercement said that the unit cost US$25m. It operates one integrated plant and four grinding plants in the country with a total production capacity of 2.9Mt/yr.

Botswana: Rachit Josh, the managing director of Matsiloje Portland Cement, say that the company will struggle to reopen without government support to block imports. The cement producer closed its plant at Matsiloje, near Francistown in January 2018, according to the Monitor newspaper. Josh blamed cement imports from South Africa as being a particular concern.

In June 2018 the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment said it was starting to introduce restrictions on imports restricting imports to 70% locally sourced product. However, it is unclear when these measures will be implemented.

Matsiloje Portland Cement is a subsidiary of Nortex Group. Its integrated plant had a production capacity of 30,000t/yr. The company produced the lime it used for its cement and it sourced other raw materials from South Africa and fly ash from a power station at Morupule.

India: The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has ordered Malabar Cements plant at Walayar, Palakkad in Kerala to comply with emissions standards or face closure. The cement producer has been given seven days to comply from the 31 December 2018, according to the Times of India newspaper. Malabar Cements was originally granted extra time, to 10 May 2018, to meet the new standards. The CPCB later declared that no cement producer would be able to flout the rules past 31 August 2018. It also intends to fine the company around US$570/day from the end of August 2018 for breaking the standards.

Spain: The Ministry of Industry and two unions have asked Cemex to keep the Gádor cement plant in Almería open. However, the Mexican cement company has rejected the pleas although it has said it will make a ‘definitive’ decision shortly, according to the Expansión newspaper. The company is due to start mandatory consultations with the unions in early November 2018. Cemex announced in mid-October 2018 that it was closing two of its seven cement plants in the country.

Well, it turns out that the European cement industry wasn’t kidding when it raised the risks of the climate mitigation on the sector. This week three (!) integrated plants have been earmarked for closure.

Cementa in Sweden said that it was considering closing its Degerhamn plant due to increased environmental regulations. Today, local press in Spain is reporting that Cemex España is planning to shut down two of its plants. These are plants in different parts of Europe with different local market dynamics but both are within the European Union (EU). That’s three plants closing out of 219 in the EU, or a loss of around 1% of production capacity.

Last week’s column on the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Global Warming raised the way the cement sector is tackling climate change and the existing and impending legislation. President of the German Cement Works Association (VDZ) Christian Knell’s opening words at the VDZ Congress in September 2018 seem prescient. He said, “To be able to realise our efforts in terms of climate protection and at the same time not to lose competitiveness, we need research policy-related support for our investment in breakthrough technologies and the corresponding demonstration projects.” The add-on was that the industry needed to focus on how the development of carbon abatement technologies can meet the 2050 climate goals and, specifically, that suitable boundary conditions would have to be created. The press releases accompanying his speech emphasised that, “on-going trends in European emissions trading and the ‘rapidly increasing’ price of CO₂ were already today leading to considerable costs for cement manufacturers.”

These words are similar to the comments Albert Scheuer, a board member of HeidelbergCement, made at the Innovation in Industrial Carbon Capture Conference early in 2018 about dividing the mounting environmental costs of cement and concrete between producers and society in general. Considering how much cementitious building materials most people use throughout their lives compared to the relative low price of cement, this argument carries some weight. In addition, the sustainability credentials of concrete buildings through longer lifespan and durability through extreme weather events is another argument that industry advocates such as the Portland Cement Association (PCA) in the US have been hawking in recent years.

Cementa, a subsidiary of HeidelbergCement, blamed anticipated tightening of environmental regulations for its decision. Although it said that the plant had made improvements over the years, the expected difficulty (read: cost) to make further improvements was becoming too hard. Shifting production to the company’s other two plants in the region, Slite on Gotland and Brevik in Norway, will reduce CO₂ emissions by 260,000t/yr.

In Spain, the news from Cemex follows a half-year report from Oficemen, the local cement association, that predicted growth for the year but not as fast as previously expected. The problem was that continued declines in the export market, the 13th decline month-by-month in a row, offset the domestic growth. Oficement president Jesús Ortiz also took time to blame rising electricity costs, expected to rise by 20% year-on-year by the end of 2018.

Market issues in Spain aren’t in doubt, but the real question for both Sweden and Spain is whether EU CO₂ legislation right now is causing cement producers to shut plants. The CO₂ emissions allowance price hit a high of Euro22/t in September 2018, the highest price in a decade. Allowances have stayed below Euro10/t since 2011 and the price has more than doubled in 2018. Throw in the mood music of the IPCC and the trend seems irresistible. How many more plants in Europe are at risk to shut next? No doubt the European cement producers have charts marking the viability of their plants against the CO₂ price. This would be a very interesting graph to get our hands on.

The 2nd FutureCem Conference on CO₂ reduction strategies for the cement industry will take place in May 2019 in London, UK