Displaying items by tag: France

Finland: Machinery manufacturer Metso Corporation has announced plans to consolidate its European warehouse operations, currently spread over Norway, Sweden, the UK, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Russia, into a single location. Metso Corporation customer logistics senior vice president Jarkko Aro said the move ‘would also enable considerable savings in end-to-end freight costs and reduced CO2 emissions.’ 40 employees are potentially affected. Metso Corporation has not disclosed any locations under consideration for the facility.

UK: Global not-for-profit organisation CDP has included HeidelbergCement on its Climate Change A-List 2019 for environmental transparency and performance aimed at facilitating a zero-net carbon economy. Only a handful of industrial producers achieved inclusion on the list, including the German steel sector’s Thyssenkrupp and French gypsum wallboard producer Saint-Gobain.

India: France-based Imerys has announced the acquisition of calcium silicate producer Hysil by its subsidiary Calderys Indian Refractories from CK Birla Group for Euro10.1m. SeeNews has reported that the expansion to Imerys’ Indian operations is aimed at securing lower prices for raw materials for use in high temperature insulation in various industries, especially the cement sector.

US: Holcim US’s 1.9Mt/yr Portland cement plant in Colorado has become the latest site to host a large-scale cement plant carbon capture and storage (CCS) study. Holcim US, in partnership withCanada-based Svante, France-based Total and US-based Occidental subsidiary Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, will install a facility designed to capture 0.73Mt/yr of CO2, which Occidental will take for safe storage underground. The study will assess the financial viability and design requirements of such an installation on a permanent basis.

US: Ragland Town and St. Clair County administrators have approved France-based Vicat’s US subsidiary National Cement’s plans for a second kiln at its 1.9Mt/yr Ragland cement plant in Alabama, construction of which will begin in early 2020. Birmingham Business Journal has reported that National Cement, which has had legal permission to build a second line since 2006, has announced that the new kiln will enter clinker production in 2022 following a total investment of US$250. National Cement is Ragland’s largest employer, with a staff of 132 at the 111-year-old Ragland plant.

France: Guy Sidos, the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Vicat Group, has launched the company’s first cement carrier, Capo Cinto. The ship was acquired in partnership with ABCRM (Agency Bulk Chartering Vicat), according to Les Petites Affiches newspaper. The Capo Cinto will supply the Corsican ports of Bastia, Porto Vecchio, Ajaccio and Propiano with bulk and bagged cement, as well as Italy and the Mediterranean from the Grave de Peille integrated cement plant. French navy Vice Admiral Anne Cullerre was also in attendence at the launch.

The Capo Cinto, previously known as the Kurske, was built in 1997. The new name refers to Monté Cinto, the highest mountain in Corsica. The refitted carrier is 90.7m long, has a capacity of nearly 2000t and it has a self-unloader.

US: The construction company Cross River has partnered with Canada-based proprietary technology manufacturer Svante to deliver industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. BusinessWire has reported that Svante has already supplied its CCS pipelines to the 1Mt/yr CO₂ment concrete plant in British Colombia, a joint operation between Swiss LafargeHolcim and French Total which uses captured CO₂ to aerate its concrete.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates entered the world of cement this week with a public relations blitz for Heliogen. He’s one of the backers of a new Californian technology startup looking to use concentrated solar power (CSP) to power heavy industrial processes like clinker or steel production. The company says it has concentrated solar energy commercially to levels above 1000°C.

Its process, called HelioMax, uses a closed-loop control system to improve the accuracy of a heliostat system. It says it achieves this by using computer vision software to better align an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight towards a single target. Temperatures of up to 1500°C is one of its targets so that it can apply itself to a variety of processes in the cement, steel, mining, petrochemical and waste treatment industries. It says it can do this for US$4.5/MCF. Another target once it hits 1500°C is to start manufacturing hydrogen or synthetic gas fuels.

Heliogen’s press release was picked up by the international press, including Global Cement, but it didn’t mention the similar work that SOLPART (Solar-Heated Reactors for Industrials Production of Reactive Particulates) project is doing in France. This project, backed by European Union Horizon 2020 funding, is developing a pilot scale high temperature (950°C) 24hr/day solar process for energy intensive non-metallic minerals’ industries like cement and lime. It’s using a 50kW solar reactor to test a fluidised bed system at the PROMES (PROcédés, Materials and Solar Energy) testing site in Odeillo, France.

Heliogen’s claim that it can beat 1000°C is significant here but it doesn’t go far enough. Clinker production requires temperatures of up to around 1450°C in the sintering phase to form the clumps of clinker. SOLPART has been only testing the calcination stage of clinker production that suits the temperature range it can achieve. Unless Heliogen can use its method to beat 1450°C then it looks likely that it will, similarly, only be able to cut fossil fuel usage in the calcination stage. If either Heliogen or SOLPART manage to do even this at the industrial scale and it is cost effective then the gains would be considerable. As well as cutting CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel usage in cement production this would reduce NO_x and SO_x emissions. It would also cut the fuel bill.

As usual this comes with some caveats. Firstly, it doesn’t touch process emissions from cement production. Decomposing limestone to make calcium oxide releases CO₂ all by itself with no fuel. About one third of cement production CO₂ emissions arise from fossil fuel usage but the remaining two thirds comes from the process emissions. However, one gain from cutting the amount of fossil fuels used is a more concentrated stream of CO₂ in the flue gas. This can potentially reduce the cost of CO₂ capture and utilisation. Secondly, concentrated solar power systems are at the mercy of the weather, particularly cloud cover. To cope with this SOLPART has been testing a storage system for hot materials to allow the process to work in a 24-hour industrial production setting.

Looking more broadly, plenty of cement producers have been building and using solar power to supply electricity. Mostly, these are photovoltaic (PV) plants but HeidelbergCement built a CSP plant in Morocco. Notably, PPC Zimbabwe said this week that it was building a solar plant to supply energy to two of its cement plants. It is doing this in order to provide a more reliable source of electricity than the local grid. India’s Birla Corporation has also said that it is buying a solar energy company today. The next step here is to try and run a cement plant kiln using electricity. This is exactly what Cementa, HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary in Sweden, and Vattenfall have been exploring as part of their CemZero project. The pilot study demonstrated that it was technically possible but only competitive compared with ‘other alternatives in order to achieve radical reductions in emissions.’

None of the above presents short or medium-term reasons for the cement industry to switch to solar power in bulk but it clearly deserves more research and, critically, funding. One particular strand to pull out here about using non-fossil fuel powered clinker production systems is that it produces purer process CO₂ emissions. Mounting carbon taxes could gradually force cement plants to capture their CO₂ but once the various technologies above become sufficiently mature they could bring this about sooner and potentially at a lower cost. In the meantime the more billionaires who take an interest in cement production the better.

France: LafargeHolcim has fulfilled its contract with the Port of Brest for the delivery of 10,000t of cement and almost 0.17Mt of draining sand by sea to the port in the Département of Brittany. A Euro220m project has been underway since 2016 for expansion and diversification of the port’s handling capacity, with completion scheduled for 2020. LafargeHolcim says that it proposed specific construction solutions for use of its materials in improving the accessibility of Brest’s existing wharves and building a new ‘heavy’ wharf.

France: Vicat has sold Euro2.06bn-worth of cement in the nine months to 30 September 2019, up by 5.7% year-on-year from Euro1.95bn in the corresponding period of 2018. Its cement section’s sales lagged behind concrete and aggregates, with a rise of 4.5% to Euro991m from Euro948m in the nine months to 30 September 2018. “The Group’s strategy of raising prices is paying off in almost all operating regions, while energy costs fell,” said Vicat Group Chairman and CEO Guy Sidos. He expects exchange rate gains to pay dividends in the final quarter, notably in Turkey.