Displaying items by tag: LafargeHolcim

Algeria/Iraq: Dal Machinery & Design (DMD), part of Turkey’s Dal Engineering Group, has been awarded a contract to supply a kiln shell to LafargeHolcim Algeria’s Oggaz cement plant. The shell has an internal diameter of 5mm. The shell will be manufactured from a single part, with one single welding in the axial direction. It is expected to be delivered by September 2019. No value for the order has been disclosed.

Other recent orders for DMD include the supply of two kiln shells for LafargeHolcim’s Bazian cement plant at Sulaimani in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The kiln shells were manufactured with a diameter of 5.2m. Delivery was made at the beginning of March 2019. DMD’s other kiln shell clients in Iraq included the Gasin cement plant in 2018. It also supplied a mill tunnion to LafargeHolcim’s Kerbala cement plant.

UK: Aggregate Industries has appointed Simon Marriott as the managing director of its Concrete Products division. He has also been promoted to the executive committee of the company as part of a strategic decision to raise the profile of the division. The new role will give him responsibility for all hard landscaping aspects of the business including Charcon, Bradstone, Masterblock, Charcon Construction Solutions and Simply Paving. He will also lead the marketing communications function.

Marriott started his career as a plant manager before moving to Bardon Aggregates in 1996. When it merged with Camas to become Aggregate Industries, he become general manager of the Express Asphalt division and later became director of the mainstream asphalt division’s southern region. He then ran Bardon Concrete and Aggregate Industries’ cement importing function, before becoming director of Concrete Products in late 2015.

Kenya: The East African Portland Cement Company (EAPCC) plans to reduce its costs by making 220 workers redundant. It says it needs US$170m to return to profitability, according to the Business Daily newspaper. Other plans to reduce its debts include raising money through land sales and reducing its energy costs. It is considering selling over 2400 hectares of land in Athi River. It has already sold around 360 hectares to Kenya Railways for around US$50m.

The company currently has 821 contracted and permanent and pensionable employees. It intends to reduce its workforce by September 2019.

UK: Aggregate Industries has launched its Lafarge Endure SR, a CEM II blended cement product that uses fly ash. It says that the product has a lower embodied CO₂, has improved plastic and hardened properties when used in concrete and has enhanced suitability for all ground types. Lafarge Endure SR is resistant to sulphates, allowing contractors and suppliers to scope a wider variety of projects. It also uses 10% less water than CEM I products to reach a workable consistency and offers improved pumpability and mixing efficiency.

“As its name suggests, Lafarge Endure SR is designed to dramatically increase the longevity of the concrete it forms a part of. It is a great solution for contractors that want to reduce the environmental impact of their build while simultaneously improving its life span,” said Steve Curley, Commercial Director at Aggregate Industries.

Algeria: LafargeHolcim Algeria’s Oggaz cement plant has been awarded ISO 14001:2015 certification for environmental management, according to the El Watan newspaper. The plant has a total cement production capcaity of 3.8Mt/yr, comprising 3.2Mt/yr of gray cement and 0.6Mt/yr of white cement. The unit also has a waste treatment facility.

France: Bertrand Collomb, the former president of Lafarge, has died at the age of 76 years. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of the building materials company from 1989 to 2003 and was later its president until 2007.

Collomb joined Lafarge in 1975 after various roles in government. He became the CEO of its North American subsidiary in 1985 before leading the company as a whole. Notable achievements during his tenure included the acquisition of the UK’s Redland and Blue Circle. Lafarge also set up a Chinese joint-venture in 1994 before many of its Western competitors.

Canada: Lafarge Canada plans to develop and demonstrate a full-cycle solution to capture and reuse CO₂ from a cement plant. Project CO₂MENT will demonstrate and evaluate Inventys' CO₂ capture system and a selection of CO₂ utilisation technologies at Lafarge's Richmond cement plant in British Colombia over the next four years. This project is being led by Inventys in partnership with Lafarge Canada and Total. It also received financial support from CCP (CO₂ Capture Project), the Province of British Colombia and Canada's federal government through the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP).

"At Inventys, we see a real opportunity to build a CO₂ marketplace where tonnes of CO₂ are traded between emitters and users," said Inventys president and chief executive officer (CEO) Claude Letourneau.

Phase I of Project CO₂MENT, the Contaminant Program, will attempt to reduce harmful organic and inorganic substances, such as sulphur dioxide, dust and soot, as well as nitrogen oxides, from cement flue gas. Phase II, the CO₂ Capture Program, will separate the CO₂ from flue gas using a customised-for-cement version of Inventys' carbon capture technology at pilot scale. Phase III, the CO₂ Reuse Program, will prepare post-combustion CO₂ for reuse and support the economical assessment and demonstration of CO₂ conversion technologies onsite, such as CO₂-injected concrete and fly ash.

Funding for the first two phases is complete and development of Phase I is underway. Phase I will begin operation in 2019 followed by Phase II and III in 2020.

Kenya: Bamburi Cement has paid a US$3m settlement to the Kenya Revenue Authority in a long-running dispute. The figure is significantly less than the US$38.5m the tax authority originally demanded in 2012, according to the Business Daily newspaper. However, the cement producer still owes US$2.8m in penalties, although it has applied to have this waived.

Philippines: Cement producers say that if the government does not implement a permanent safeguard duty on cement imports they may reconsider investment plans to upgrade their plants. Representatives of Taiheyo Cement, Republic Cement, Holcim and Cemex made the comments at public hearings by the Tariff Commission, according to the Philippine Star newspaper. The commission is conducting an investigation to determine whether the provisional safeguard duty imposed by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) on cement imports should be kept.

During the hearings, Cirilo Pestaño II the executive director of the Cement Manufacturers Association of the Philippines (CEMAP), lobbied the government to impose a higher ‘definitive’ safeguard duty. He said that imports of cement rose by 64% year-on-year to 1.74Mt in the first quarter of 2019 from 1.06Mt in the same period in 2018 despite the provisional safeguard measure being in place.

Today is the first day of the Global FutureCem Conference taking place in Brussels, Belgium. The event is looking at how the cement industry can adapt to a low or zero carbon world. Although Global Cement is organising the event, it is clearly topical as two news stories this week demonstrate.

Firstly, the chief executive officers (CEO) from 13 US companies, including LarfargeHolcim, announced that they were lobbying the US government to enact business-led climate change legislation. The initiative, known as the CEO Climate Dialogue, included principles such as ‘significantly’ reducing US greenhouse gas emissions. This is shocking because, at face value, large-scale CO₂ emitters like LafargeHolcim have the most to lose from more rigorous environmental regulations. What do they have to gain from doing this? This is like turkeys voting for Christmas!

Interpretations of why LafargeHolcim and others might want to do this could go in a few directions. Firstly, the intention might be fully plausible. These companies could genuinely want to combat climate change. Secondly, more cynically perhaps, leading demands for legislation puts the lobbyists in the room when change is actually made. Given the integral nature of concrete in modern construction this is not necessarily a bad thing. Environmentalists may want to ban building materials that create CO₂ emissions but, until they can offer an alternative or convince people to accept reduced quality of life, then cement is the material of choice. Thirdly, leading change allows one to stay ahead of it or at least give the sector more time to react to it. The ‘turkeys’ may not want to vote for ‘Christmas,’ but perhaps ‘Christmas’ could be replaced with something else?

This latest initiative by the CEOs in the US has parallels with the creation of the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) in 2018. Like the current moves in the US, cement producers led the creation of the GCCA, to promote concrete as the sustainable building material of choice.

Meanwhile, Germany’s HeidelbergCement also announced this week that its CO₂ reduction targets to 2030 have been assessed against the Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi) criteria. Its SBTi target is to reduce scope 1 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 15% per ton of cementitious material by 2030 from a 2016 base year. HeidelbergCement has also committed to reduce scope 2 GHG emissions by 65% per ton of cementitious materials within the same timeframe. The SBTi target follows HeidelbergCement’s previous goal of a 30% reduction in its specific net CO₂ emissions by 2030 compared with 1990. It says it has achieved a reduction of 20% so far.

HeidelbergCement is a sustainability leader in the sector with various projects on the go including the Low Emissions Intensity Lime And Cement (LEILAC) consortium direct separation pilot project at the Lixhe cement plant in Belgium. Following SBTi is a continuation of this trend, albeit one that anchors it with a global consensus.

Coincidence perhaps but when the two largest non-Chinese cement producers start announcing sustainability stories like then the picture is changing. The questions at this point is how far will it go.

A full review of the 3rd Global FutureCem Conference will be published after the event. To find it and more information visit: http://www.globalcement.com/conferences/global-future-cement/introduction