Displaying items by tag: Coolbrook

Emir Adigüzel warned that cement prices in Europe could triple under current decarbonisation policies. The director of the World Cement Association (WCA) made the comments at a conference in Germany this week. He noted that most of these carbon-related costs will be passed to consumers. His view is that carbon pricing will force price rises across the industry.

That cement prices will rise due to decarbonisation policies is not in itself news. This debate is really about how much and who pays. The WCA's latest analysis asserts that the cement sector will require investment of US$200bn by 2050 to fully decarbonise. Some progress has been achieved so far. Major cement companies reduced carbon intensity from an average of 700kg CO₂/t in 2019 to 640kg CO₂/t in 2023. Adigüzel’s argument is that carbon capture (CCUS) in the cement sector has its place only “if applied correctly.” His view is that these technologies will have a limited effect on global industry decarbonisation as the required investment per cement plant exceeds the capital cost of an entire cement plant. The WCA prefers to promote decarbonisation instead via energy efficiency, alternative fuels, reduced clinker factor and new technologies. That last one includes CCUS but is not limited to it also covering things such as electrification and heat storage. Note today’s news that India-based Adani Cement has ordered a RotoDynamic Heater from Coolbrook. Adigüzel also criticised the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) in incentivising non-scheme exporters to reduce their carbon footprint, particularly given the expensive investments required.

Decarbonisation is going to be expensive and CCUS is the priciest part of this. Hence, cement producers are likely to consider taking as many measures as possible before implementing CCUS. That cement companies would pass on these costs to consumers also seems likely. The other obvious outcome is that consumers will simply use less cement where possible. Yet Adigüzel doesn’t address how net zero can be achieved with continuing clinker production without using CCUS. His pricing for CCUS is at the right scale though. As Boston Consulting Group (BCG) pointed out in 2024, the cost of CCUS looks set to increase cement prices from US$90 – 130/t to at least US$160 – 240/t by 2050. As well as the capital costs to build a CCUS unit, this includes the additional energy costs required and the price of transporting the CO₂ to a sequestration site. The first two large-scale Heidelberg Materials CCUS projects in Europe, for example, both connect to government-backed transport and sequestration schemes. BCG went on to posit that decarbonisation trends would create five archetypes of cement plants: export hubs and larger plants close to CO₂ storage sites; former export sites far from storage; import grinding hubs; and stranded assets.

Finally, Carbon Brief reported this week that CO₂ emissions in China continued to stay flat in the third quarter of 2025, suggesting a stable or falling trend since early 2024. The adoption of electric vehicles and declines from cement and steel production contributed to the picture in the latest quarter. Emissions from the production of cement and other building materials fell by 7% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2025. This was attributed to the ongoing real-estate contraction. Note that this decarbonisation trend in China has been created by market trends.

Expect plenty more sustainability stories everywhere over the next few weeks as the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) started this week in Belém, Brazil. The GCCA will be present at a number of events including an update to the Brazil Cement Industry Roadmap on Saturday 15 November 2025

The Global FutureCem Conference on cement industry decarbonisation will take place on 21 - 22 January 2026 in Munich, Germany

India: Adani Cement and Finland-based Coolbrook have announced an agreement to implement the world’s first commercial deployment of Coolbrook’s RotoDynamic heater (RDH) at Adani’s Boyareddypalli integrated cement plant in Andhra Pradesh. The project reportedly aims to ‘significantly’ reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production.

The RDH system will decarbonise the calcination phase of cement production by supplying ‘clean’ heat powered entirely by renewable energy from Adani. The installation is expected to cut around 60,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions, with potential for a tenfold increase in future phases, according to the producer.

The partnership also includes plans to expand the use of RotoDynamic technology across other Adani Cement sites, with five additional projects targeted within two years. The first-generation RDH will deliver hot gases of around 1000°C to dry and optimise the use of alternative fuels.

India: Ambuja Cements has started a strategic partnership with Finland-based Coolbrook to use its RotoDynamic Heater (RDH). The technology uses renewably powered electrical heat to replace or reduce the amount of fossil fuels used for reaching high temperatures in cement kiln pre-calciners. No indication of the price or which cement plants will be upgraded with the equipment has been disclosed. The deal is intended to help Ambuja Cements meet its targets of reaching an alternative fuels thermal substitution rate of 28% and a renewable energy rate of 60% by 2028.

Ajay Kapur, CEO - Cement Business, Adani Group, said, “We continuously seek out innovations which drive efficiency and decarbonisation across our cement manufacturing value chain. Leveraging our Adani Group’s green power generation capabilities, we will be able to reduce fossil fuel dependence, costs, and emissions, ultimately delivering the best value for our stakeholders.”

India: JSW Cement has appointed Finland-based Coolbrook to install its RotoDynamic Heater electric kiln technology at the Vijayagar steel works and slag and cement grinding plant in Karnataka. Press Trust of India News has reported that the partners expect the technology to reduce the CO₂ emissions of the plant’s slag cement.

Read about the applications for the RotoDynamic Heater in cement production in this Global Cement interview with Coolbrook CEO Joonas Rauramo.

Netherlands: Finland-based Coolbrook has completed the first test phase of the large-scale pilot of its RotoDynamic Heater (RDH) at the Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Geleen, Netherlands. The engineering company says that this has validated the RDH’s technical pathway up to industrial heat generation at temperatures suitable for cement plants. By developing and launching the technology, Coolbrook says that it will rely on a ‘comprehensive partnership ecosystem,’ including market leaders in technology and industry. It says that the RDH has the potential to eliminate 2.4Bnt/yr of CO₂ emissions – 30% of global industrial CO₂ emissions and 7% of all global CO₂ emissions.

CEO Joonas Rauramo said “Sharing our partners’ and customers’ sense of urgency to achieve net zero, we take determined actions to execute our strategy and progress towards the commercial launch of our electric technology. We are proceeding with first commercial agreements, while continuing to build our organisation and supply chain for industrial scale operations.”

India: UltraTech Cement has announced a plans to install a RotoDynamic Heater (RDH) supplied by Finland-based Coolbrook at one of its cement plants. The RDH uses renewably powered electrical heat, eliminating the need for cement fuels. UltraTech Cement will initially test the equipment in the drying of alternative fuel (AF) in its existing AF line.

UltraTech Cement managing director Kailash Jhanwar said “As a founding member of the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), we are committed to the sectoral aspiration of delivering net zero concrete by 2050. Towards this end, we are continuously striving to innovate at every stage of the whole life of concrete. Coolbrook’s RDH technology represents an exciting technological pathway that we believe has the potential to exponentially accelerate our progress towards full decarbonisation. Every megawatt of clean energy we add to our mix makes a big difference.”

Read more about Coolbrook’s RDH in the September 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine

Finland: Coolbrook has appointed Nigel Pearce as Head of Manufacturing and Supply Chain. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce where he held a number of positions in his 33-year career at the company, most recently as Head of Manufacturing Engineering. He joins Coolbrook with experience in the development of gas turbine technology. At Coolbrook, Pearce will lead the company's manufacturing team, overseeing the planning, coordination, and performance of its processes. He will also be responsible for developing new and existing relationships with suppliers and optimising the procurement of materials and technology needed for Coolbrook to meet its production timeline.

Coolbrook is a technology and engineering company that is developing processes to replace the burning of fossil fuels in major industrial sectors. Its RDH has potential applications in cement, steel and chemical production process. Its Roto Dynamic Reactor (RDR) is intended to eliminate CO₂ emissions from the steam cracking process used in the production of plastic.

Finland: Coolbrook, the manufacturer of electrically-powered gas heating technologies, has announced the appointment of Mikko Jaatinen as its first chief financial officer (CFO). Jaatinen was previously heading the Group Treasury's Funding & Markets team at Neste, a renewable fuels and circular solution company.

In his role as CFO at Coolbrook, Jaatinen will ensure that the company’s financial strategies and policies support its growing global partnerships and commercial relationships, including those with Cemex and UltraTech Cement. He will support Coolbrook’s ambitions of international expansion and scaling up its operations, and lead the development of sustainable financial strategies.

Coolbrook’s chief executive officer Joonas Rauramo said, “The appointment of a CFO is the next logical step in the growth and development of Coolbrook. Mikko’s experience and expertise in a wide range of finance functions and new business development combined with his leadership qualities make him ideally suited to the role.”

Read Global Cement’s interview with Joonas Rauramo in its September 2022 issue

Finland: Coolbrook has appointed Joonas Rauramo as its chief executive officer. In this role he will be responsible for overseeing the transition from a research and development focused organisation to a commercial-led business with the aim of partnering with the large companies in petrochemical, steel and cement sectors. Rauramo succeeds Harri Johannesdahl in the role, who has chosen to take a less hands-on role at the business and will stay on in an advisory capacity.

Rauramo joined Coolbrook in late 2021 as its Executive Vice President, Strategy and Industrial Partnerships. Prior to this he worked for the Finland-based energy company Fortum for over a decade.

Finland-based Coolbrook is a technology and engineering company that is developing processes to replace the burning of fossil fuels in major industrial sectors. Its RDH has potential applications in cement, steel and chemical production process. Its Roto Dynamic Reactor (RDR) is intended to eliminate CO₂ emissions from the steam cracking process used in the production of plastic.

Look out for an interview with Joonas Rauramo in the September 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine

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