Displaying items by tag: Heracles Cement

Greece: Heracles, part of the Holcim Group, has signed a front-end engineering design contract (FEED) with Air Liquide for CO₂ capture, liquefaction, storage and dispatch facilities at the Heracles plant in Milaki, as part of the Olympus carbon capture and storage (CCS) project. The project will enable the plant to capture and store 1Mt/yr of CO₂ and is scheduled for full operation in 2029. The captured CO₂ will be liquefied and transported by sea to the offshore sequestration facility in Prinos in the northern part of the Aegean Sea.

Greece: Switzerland-based LafargeHolcim subsidiary Heracles Group has established a Direction for Sustainable Development. The producer said that Charalampos Kouris will head the Direction, with the aim of building a more sustainable present for a better future. It will realise this by pursuing four pillars: climate, circular economy, nature and local communities. Regarding the first of these, it will follow the EU Green Deal climate neutrality roadmap.

Chief executive officer Dimitris Hanis said “We are pleased with the appointment of Mr Kouris as the first head of sustainable development and welcome him to the group's executive committee. The establishment of the new Direction will further reinforce our effort to ensure a healthy and safe workplace for our people while at the same time fighting our own battle against our climate change impact."

Greece: Heracles Group, part of Switzerland-based LafargeHolcim, has obtained environmental product declarations (EPDs) for all cements produced at its Volos and Milaki cement plants. The company says that the declarations cover both bagged and bulk products.

Chief executive officer Dimitris Chanis said, “For 110 years, at Heracles Group we have learned to always push the limits of the seemingly possible, pioneer and constantly move forward. Driven by our unwavering priority of sustainable development and our vision regarding the green transformation of the construction sector, we strategically design and develop policies and initiatives that promote a climate neutral and circular economy. EPDs are expected to play a key part in our group's effort to move towards more sustainable construction for a greener and better world for all.”

Greece: Heracles Cement recorded sales of Euro189m in 2020, consistent with 2019 levels. Its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 36% year-on-year to Euro35.5m from Euro26.1m. Lower cement prices domestically partly offset an increase in cement volumes, resulting in domestic cement sales growth of 7%. Cement exports fell by 16%. Positive currency exchange effects against the US dollar constrained the export drop.

The subsidiary of Switzerland-based LafargeHolcim said that it is firmly pursuing its strategy with new investments aimed at the on-going improvement of its environmental footprint and transition to innovative and sustainable building solutions, always respecting people, society and the environment.

Greece: Heracles Cement has agreed an electricity energy deal with the Public Power Corporation. The three-year deal with the state-owned energy company will start at the end of 2020. It includes a 10% increase in the rate. The agreement is also part of the country’s Greenpass scheme. The subsidiary of LafargeHolcim operates two integrated plants in the country.

The European Union’s (EU) verified CO₂ emissions figures were released earlier this week on 1 April 2019. The good news is that no cement plant is within the top 100 largest emitters. All the top spots are held by power plants, iron and steel producers and the odd airline. Indeed, out of all of the verified emissions, cement clinker or lime production only represents 7% of the total emissions. Of course this is too much if the region wants to meet its climate change commitments but it is worth remembering that other industries have a long way to go as well and they don’t necessarily face the intrinsic process challenges that clinker production has. If the general public or governments are serious about cutting CO₂ emissions then they might consider, for example, taking fewer flights with airlines before picking on the cement industry.

The EU emitted 117Mt of CO₂ from its clinker and lime producers in 2018, a 2.7% year-on-year decrease compared to 120Mt in 2017. This compares to 158Mt in 2008, giving a 26% drop in emissions over the decade to 2018. However, there are two warnings attached to this data. First, there are plants on this list that have closed between 2008 and 2018. Second, there are plants that provided no data in 2018, for example, all the plants in Bulgaria. Climate change think tank Sandbag helpfully pointed out in its analysis of the EU emissions data that industrial emissions have barely decreased since 2012. The implication here being that the drop from 2008 to 2012 was mainly due to the economic recession. Sandbag also made the assertion that 96% of the cement industry’s emissions were covered by free allocations in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) thereby de-incentivising sector willingness to decarbonise.

By country the emissions in 2018 from cement and lime roughly correspond with production capacity, although this comes with the caveat that emissions link to actual production not potential capacity. So, Germany leads followed by Spain, Italy, Poland and France. Of these Poland is a slight outlier, as will be seen below.

Table 1: Top 10 CO₂ emitting plants in the European Union in 2018. Source: European Commission.

Poland leads the count in the top 10 EU CO₂ emitting cement plants in 2018 with five plants. Greece follows with two plants. This list is deceptive as all of these plants are large ones with production capacities of 2Mt/yr and above. As it contains many of the largest plants in the EU no wonder the emissions are the highest. It is also worth considering that there are far larger plants outside of the EU.

In summary, as most readers will already know, the cement industry is a significant minority CO₂ emitter in the EU. Countries with larger cement sectors emit more CO₂ as do larger plants. So far, so obvious. Emissions are down since 2008 but this mostly seems to have stalled since 2012, bar a blip in 2017. The change though has been the rising carbon price in the EU ETS in 2018. Coincidentally the carbon price has been fairly low and stable since 2012. If the mechanism is working properly then changes should start to appear in 2019. Already in 2018 a few European cement producers announced plant closures and blamed the carbon price. Watch this space.

The Global Future Cement Conference & Exhibition on low and zero CO2 cement production will take place in Brussels, Belgium on 22 - 23 May 2019

Greece: Dimitris Hanis has been appointed as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Heracles Group, a subsidiary of LafargeHolcim. Hanis began working in Heracles Group in 2003 and has since taken executive positions in the group, according to the Athens News Agency. Heracles Group is the largest cement producer in Greece, with more than 100 years of presence in the market. It operates a network of 33 production and commercial facilities in the country.

Greece: George Michos has been appointed CEO of Heracles, member of LafargeHolcim Group, assuming his duties as of 1 October 2015. He succeeds Pierre Deleplanque, who after seven years in Heracles, moves to become Area Manager Emerging Europe of LafargeHolcim Group, while remaining on the board of Heracles as a non-executive member.

George Michos had previously been Senior Vice President RMX Concrete for Lafarge since January 2013 and in parallel, since July 2014, leader of the Operating Model & Organisation workstream for the LafargeHolcim merger. He joined Heracles General Cement in Greece in 2004 and held various executive positions before moving to India in early 2008 and becoming the COO of Lafarge India. In mid-2011 he became Senior Vice President Cement Strategy and M&A for the Lafarge Group in Paris.

He began his career in the construction industry in Greece in 1994 and from 1998 until 2003 he worked in consulting companies in London, Paris and Athens. Michos is 45 years old and married with one daughter, is a graduate of the National Technical University of Athens in Electrical & Computer Engineering (Dipl. Eng) and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

The Greek debt crisis directly hit the local cement industry on Tuesday 30 June 2015 when Titan Cement reported that it was unable to pay a dividend to its shareholders. The leading local cement producer blamed the capital controls introduced by the government.

It is worth looking at the effects on the domestic cement industry as the Eurozone bureaucracy and the Greek government play 'chicken' with each other while Greece starts the default process, having failed to pay the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) payment on 30 June 2015. Greece will now join a group, possibly even more select than the European Union, of countries that have failed to pay back the IMF, including current defaulters like Sudan and Zimbabwe.

A better comparison might be made with Argentina which defaulted upon its foreign debts in 2001. Its construction industry fell by 12% year-on-year in 2001 and by a further 30% in 2002. Cement consumption and cement production utilisation rates hit 23% in 2002. One key difference with Greece is that the country has had major financial difficulties for far longer than Argentina. Argentina ran into financial depression in 1998 and defaulted in 2001. Greece ran into financial trouble following the 2008 financial crisis and then received its first bailout in 2010.

As the capital controls show, even initial responses to the financial situations are impacting upon the standard transactions a limited company conducts. The Financial Times ran an article in May 2015 examining the potential effects on businesses of a debt default and Greek exit from the Eurozone (Grexit). In short, business and commerce will continue where possible reacting to whatever comes their way. For example, an olive oil producer reported switching to exports to make profits. Crucially though, another company interviewed, a construction contractor, worried about potential cuts to government or EU-led infrastructure projects.

As Titan reported in its first quarter results for 2015, its Greek market has been dependent on road building. In February 2014 Titan Cement reported its first improved operating results in seven years followed by profit in 2014 as a whole. The other major cement producers, Lafarge subsidiary Heracles General Cement and Italcementi subsidiary Halyps Cement, reported an improved construction market in 2014 with rising cement volumes. However, it was noted by Lafarge that it was developing exports to 'optimise kiln utilisation.' Titan also noted the benefits of exports in its first quarter report for 2015, focusing on a strengthening US Dollar versus the Euro. Given on-going events, one suspects there is going to be a lot more 'development' of this kind.

To set some sense of scale of the crisis Jim O'Neill, former head of economics at Goldman Sachs, famously calculated that, at the height of its growth, China created an economy the size of Greece's every three months. What happens next is down to the crystal balls of economists, although the path of least resistance now seems to be pointing at further default, departure from the Eurozone and Euro and further significant financial pain for Greece.

It looks likely that the local construction market will stay subdued and exports will offer a lifeline. How much the EU is prepared to let Greece default on its bills and then try and undercut its own over-capacity cement industries remains to be seen. However, since the main cement producers in Greece are all multinational outfits, it will afford them some flexibility in their strategy in coping with the fallout. Meanwhile a cement production capacity of around 14Mt/yr for a population of 11m suggests over capacity by European standards. If exports can't help then the situation looks grim.

UPDATE: Here is Global Cement's previous take on Greece from June 2012