Displaying items by tag: Heidelberg Materials

UK: MQP (Midland Quarry Products) has appointed Andrew Boileau as its managing director. He succeeds Rick Green, who has retired after a 40-year career in the industry, taking responsibility for MQP’s three quarries and 10 asphalt plants located across the Midlands. MQP is a subsidiary of Heidelberg Materials.

Boileau previously worked as the Programme Director for STARK Building Materials. He has also held various senior roles at Saint-Gobain, including Managing Director of Gibbs and Dandy.

US: Heidelberg Materials has successfully converted its cement plant in Speed, Indiana, into a slag grinding facility. The facility ceased Portland cement production in 2023 following the opening of a new plant in Mitchell, Indiana, and now produces slag cement using domestically sourced slag granules. The Speed site has a grinding capacity of over 400,000t/yr and also functions as a distribution hub for the Mitchell plant's cement and other products.

Global: Heidelberg Materials has launched the sixth edition of the Quarry Life Award, encouraging global participation to develop sustainable quarry management solutions. Open to researchers, students, communities, non-government organisations (NGO) and nature enthusiasts, the competition offers a prize fund of around €300,000 and aligns with the company's commitment to the Global Goal for Nature. Partnering with organisations like BirdLife International, the initiative aims to enhance biodiversity at extraction sites. Since its inception in 2011, the Quarry Life Award has spurred over 450 projects aimed at biodiversity protection. The 2025 edition will see Heidelberg Materials open its quarries for selected projects, with Türkiye, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Indonesia joining as new participants.

Chief sustainability officer Nicola Kimm said "The Quarry Life Award is a key element of our biodiversity strategy, which relies on strong partnerships with stakeholders to engage across science, industry, and local communities. To truly move from biodiversity loss to gain, a concerted effort is needed by everyone, working together in the recovery of nature at a landscape scale."

Germany: Heidelberg Materials, in partnership with Linde, is constructing a large-scale carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) facility at its Lengfurt cement plant, set to start operating in 2025. According to the company, it will be the first of its kind. The project is named Capture-to-Use (CAP2U) and will capture 70,000t/yr of CO₂.

Christian Knell, general manager of Heidelberg Materials Germany, said "With the amine scrubbing technology applied here in Lengfurt, we are demonstrating the capture and utilisation of CO₂ on an industrial scale for the first time in the cement industry in Germany.”

Germany: Heidelberg Materials has appointed Katharina Beumelburg as its Chief Sustainability & New Technologies Officer. She succeeds Nicola Kimm, who will leave the company on 31 August 2024. Beumelburg will take up her position on 1 October 2024.

Beumelburg joins Heidelberg Materials from SLB (formerly Schlumberger), where she has worked as the Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer since May 2021. Previously, she spent over 15 years at Siemens, Siemens Energy, and Hydrogen Europe, focusing on business strategy and excellence as well as energy systems. She has studied Industrial Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and holds a PhD in Robotics and Automation from the University of Stuttgart.

Italy: The Italian cement association Federbeton has appointed Stefano Gallini as its president. He succeeds Roberto Callieri in the position.

Gallini is currently the CEO of Heidelberg Materials Italia, a role he assumed at the start of 2024. Before this he was the West African Region Managing Director for Heildelberg Materials and the Managing Director for Sierra Leone. Gallini previously worked for Italcementi from 2000 to 2017 becoming the company’s Chief Commercial Officer Egypt in 2010.

Spain: Heidelberg Materials, the owner of Cementos Rezola, has announced a restructuring plan that will affect 56 employees, roughly half of the workforce at the Añorga plant in Donostia. This decision comes as part of an employment regulation filing (ERE) linked to the cessation of clinker production in a move towards decarbonising cement manufacturing.

The company has proposed 15 early retirements, 30 internal relocations (to other plants within the group) and 11 external relocations. Unions have clarified that of the internal transfers, 15 positions are offered at the Arrigorriaga plant in Bizkaia. Management stated that those not interested in relocation options within the group will be offered external relocation solutions and can avail of measures the company will implement to assist in finding new employment in the labour market.

The company said “The ERE targets positions that are no longer required as a result of the cessation of clinker production, necessary to meet decarbonisation obligations.”
Despite the significant impact of the ERE, the company highlighted that this represents a proportion ‘substantially lower than the decrease in activity volume’ at the Añorga plant. It also confirmed plans to continue cement production in Añorga using clinker produced at the ‘more efficient plant in Arrigorriaga’.

This transition will support a €32m investment from 2024 to 2026 aimed at decarbonising both plants. Half of this investment will be allocated to the Añorga plant to transform it into a facility specialising in ‘sustainable’ cement.

Germany: Calix's subsidiary Leilac and Heidelberg Materials have formed a joint venture to build the Leilac-2 low emission cement demonstration plant at Heidelberg's Ennigerloh facility. Construction is set to begin in 2025, with the plant's commissioning scheduled for mid-2026. The Leilac-2 plant will showcase a module capable of capturing up to 100,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions from cement and lime production. Following construction and commissioning, Leilac-2 will be operated for up to three years to test the performance of the technology.

The project benefits from €16m in funding from the EU's Horizons 2020 programme and contributions from partner cement companies. Following construction, Heidelberg Materials may repay Leilac's capital contribution, and the partners will consider a full-scale commercial installation of Leilac technology at a Heidelberg plant. Plans for Leilac-3 envisage a significantly increased capture capacity, potentially capturing 0.5–1Mt/yr of CO₂.

Leilac CEO Daniel Rennie said "The formation of a joint venture with Heidelberg Materials for the Leilac-2 plant marks another important milestone for commercialisation of the Leilac technology. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with Heidelberg Materials to demonstrate and deploy cost-effective solutions to decarbonise cement production at commercial scale.”

Spain: Heidelberg Materials plans to stop clinker production at its Añorga plant near San Sebastián and run the site as a cement grinding plant instead. It says it intends to use the change to focus on low-carbon cement products in Spain and the South-West of France. The clinker required to supply the markets in Northern Spain and the South-West of France will be produced at Heidelberg Materials Spain’s Bilbao plant instead. The closure of the clinker production line at Añorga will start once staff negotiations at the plant are completed. The company said that, “socially acceptable solutions for all affected employees are being sought.”

Delegates at the Global CemCCUS Conference last week applauded when Anders Petersen, the Senior Project Manager Brevik CCS, Heidelberg Materials said that the Brevik cement plant will be capturing CO₂ and permanently storing it within the year. Rightly so. This moment will mark a historic milestone for the sector when it arrives. Net zero cement production is coming.

Last week’s event in Oslo delivered an overview of the current state of carbon capture in the cement and lime industries. It explored the practical challenges these industries face in capturing CO₂ emissions and - crucially – then working out what to do with them afterwards. Incredibly, delegates were able to view the construction site of Heidelberg Materials’ forthcoming full-scale carbon capture unit at its Brevik plant in Norway. On the same day as the tour, Holcim broke ground on the Go4Zero carbon capture project at its Obourg plant in Belgium.

The key takeaway at the conference was that a (dusty) bulk solids sector is starting to work with handling (clean) gases in a way it hasn’t before. This recurred repeatedly throughout the conference. Petersen summarised it well when he described Brevik as a meeting pointing between the cement industry and the petrochemical one. It looks likely at present that there will not be a single predominant carbon capture technology that the majority of cement plants will deploy in the future. Similarly, CO₂ storage infrastructure and sequestration sites differ. Utilisation plans are less developed but also offer various options. Yet, if carbon capture becomes common at cement and lime plants, then these companies will need to learn how to filter and handle gases regardless of the capture method and destination for the CO₂. So presentations on filtration and compressors were a revelation at CemCCUS.

The key obstacle remains how to pay for it all. By necessity, most of the big early projects have received external funding, mostly from governments. Although, to be fair, the private companies involved are often investing considerable amounts of their own money and taking risks in the process too. In the European Union (EU) CO₂ is being priced via the Emissions Trading Scheme and investments are being made via the EU Innovation Fund and other schemes. In the US the approach lies in tax breaks, on-shoring and investment in new sustainable technologies.

However, other countries have different priorities. Or as a South Asian contact told Global Cement Weekly at a different conference, “How can our government think about sustainability when it can’t feed everyone?” The world’s biggest cement producing countries are China and India, and then the EU and the US follow. Brazil, Türkiye and Vietnam are at similar levels or not far behind. The EU and the US represent about 9% of global cement production based on Cembureau figures for 2022. China and India cover 61% of production. Neither of these countries has announced a plan to encourage the widespread construction of carbon capture units. Once China ‘gets’ cement carbon capture though, it seems plausible that it will dominate it as it has in many other sectors such as solar panel production. Exporters such as Türkiye and Vietnam will have to adapt to the rules of their target markets.

The march by the cement and lime sectors towards carbon capture has been long, difficult and expensive. It also has a long, long way to go. Yet, the next decade promises to be exciting as new technologies are developed and tested, full-scale projects are commissioned and CO₂ pipelines, sequestration sites and usage hubs come online. The next key milestones to look out for include the first full-scale installations using other capture methods (such as oxy-fuel kilns), the first CO₂ pipeline network that hooks up to a cement plant, the first land-based sequestration site, the first industrial hub that uses CO₂ at scale to manufacture a product, new government policies in China and India, and the first large unit that is funded entirely from private finance. To end on a positive note, a Cembureau representative at the Global CemCCUS Conference reckoned that Europe will be able to capture 12Mt/yr of CO₂ by 2030. If it happens, this will be a major achievement and a serious statement of intent towards net zero for the sector.

This short recap of the event barely touches the surface of what happened so be sure to read the full review of the 1st Global CemCCUS Conference.

The 2nd Global CemCCUS Conference will take place in Hamburg in May 2025