Displaying items by tag: Lehigh Hanson

US: Heidelberg Materials North America has reached an agreement with the administration of Santa Clara County to decommission its quarry in the county, near Cupertino. Silicon Valley News has reported that the quarry historically supplied limestone for cement production at Permanente cement plant, which came offline in April 2020. The county administration says that the deal signals that it has achieved its aim to ensure final closure of the Permanente plant.

Heidelberg Materials North America spokesperson Jeff Sieg said that the company is ‘pleased to formalise our agreement not to restart the kiln at our Permanente cement plant.’ He continued "We remain focused on working collaboratively with the community and other stakeholders on the development of a long-term strategy for the property, so that it can continue to provide value in the future.”

Heidelberg Materials announced a US acquisition at the same time as the ongoing IEEE/IAS-PCA Cement Conference in Dallas, Texas this week. It has entered into a purchase agreement to acquire The SEFA Group, a fly ash recycling company based in Lexington, South Carolina. Its operations include five beneficiation plants, five utility partners, 20 locations and over 500 employees. It supplies fly ash to over 800 ready-mixed concrete plants in 13 states. It processes around 1Mt/yr of ash from storage ponds using its proprietary thermal beneficiation process. No value for the acquisition was disclosed.

The proposition for a heavy building materials manufacturer of securing a supply of fly ash is an attractive one. Fly ash can improve the performance of concrete, reduce its cost by lowering the amount of ordinary Portland cement (OPC) required and decrease the associated carbon footprint. It can also be use to make blended cement products. Heidelberg Materials and its US-subsidiary Lehigh Hanson could have various options here including using this new supply of fly ash internally, selling it on to other companies or licensing the beneficiation technology. Heidelberg Materials’ global sustainability report in 2021 reported that just under 9% of its cement-type portfolio comprised pozzolana or fly ash cements.

Graph 1: Coal combustion product production and use, 1991 – 2021. Source: ACAA.

Data from the American Coal Ash Association (ACAA) shows in Graph 1 that coal combustion products (CCP) production have declined in the last decade as the proportion used has steadily risen. In its annual production and use survey, the ACAA revealed that the use of harvested ash continued to grow in 2021 and that it constituted around 10% of the volume of ash recycled from current power plant operation. Thomas H Adams, the executive director of the ACAA, said “The rapidly increasing utilisation of harvested CCP shows that beneficial use markets are adapting to the decline in coal-fuelled electricity generation in the US. New logistics and technology strategies are being deployed to ensure these valuable resources remain available for safe and productive use.” Separately, the ACAA reported that coal-fuelled power stations represented about 50% of the country’s electricity demand in the mid-2010s compared to 20 – 25% in 2021 despite base-load remaining the same. It forecast that fly ash production was likely to remain fairly constant to around 2040 but that harvesting would help to cut the gap between supply and demand in some regional markets. It said that over 2Bnt of coal ash was in disposal. However, no indication of how recoverable this was given although it did note the higher cost of beneficiation. Work on updating specifications was ongoing to suit current circumstances.

As with the slag market, this presents a dilemma for cement and concrete producers that want to become more sustainable. They want to use more by-products from other carbon-intensive heavy industries – such as coal-fired power stations and steel plants – but these industries themselves are also trying to become more sustainable and are producing less secondary cementitious materials. Heidelberg Materials’ interest in a fly ash beneficiation company makes sense because it secures a bigger portion of a dwindling resource from the direct operations and opens up the possibility of selling the beneficiation technology to others. It is also worth mentioning that other fly ash thermal beneficiation processes are available. For example, Charah Solutions installed its MP618 technology at its Sulphur terminal in Louisiana in early 2019.

The general fly ash market in the US looks set to track the level of coal-fired power generation for the foreseeable future. Yet the proportion of CCPs being used continues to rise. In this context focusing on harvesting may be starting to make more financial sense. Charah Solutions’s new unit in 2019 and SEFA Group’s new units in 2020 and 2021 seem to support this view. Heidelberg Materials’ acquisition of SEFA Group may be further confirmation of this.

Canada/US: Lehigh Hanson has rebranded as Heidelberg Materials North America, with immediate effect. The cement producer said that the new brand reflects its broad, innovation-driven approach to becoming the North American industry leader in sustainability and digital solutions.

President and chief executive officer Chris Ward said “This is a major step change for our company, both globally and here in North America. We are thrilled to begin this transformation in North America today, and continue our global journey to grow our business beyond cement and aggregates and become the most sustainable company in the sector.”

US: Lehigh Hanson is preparing to start cutting jobs at the Glens Falls cement plant in New York from April 2023. The majority of the employees at the site will be laid off in April 2023 with some staff to be retained until later until 2023, according to the Times Union newspaper. It was previously reported in November 2022 that the subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials was planning to close the plant in a phased manner in 2023. Production from the Glens Falls site will be covered in the future by the company’s new Mitchell plant in Indiana.

US: Lehigh Hanson has announced the upcoming permanent closure of its Glens Falls cement plant in northeastern New York. Times Union News has reported that the producer has extended an offer of financial and job-hunting support to the plant's 85 employees. A phased closure will commence in 2023. The company said that 'changes to the competitive landscape within the context of a global cement industry' partly informed its decision, in addition to the 'small, aging and inefficient' condition of operations at the plant. Lehigh Hanson's Mitchell, Indiana, cement plant will cover the plant's market in future.

Lehigh Hanson Northeast regional president Alex Car said "We are committed to continuing to supply our customers in the New England region. We have the available capacity to meet the current and future needs of our customers, even after the Glens Falls plant halts production." Car added "We are thankful for the dedication and efforts of our Glens Falls workforce over the years and we will work to minimise the impacts to our employees and the community as much as possible."

US: Lehigh Hanson plans to stop cement production at its integrated Permanente plant near Cupertino in California. The subsidiary of Germany-based Heidelberg Materials plans to use the site as a distribution centre and to continue some quarry work, according to the Mercury News newspaper. The cement plant was originally opened in 1939 but it stopped clinker production in 2020.

Germany: The former HeidelbergCement launched its new name and branding as Heidelberg Materials at a group level on 20 September 2022. The new two-word moniker underlines the cement producer's pioneering role on the path to building materials digitisation and carbon neutrality. 'Materials' stands for its innovative portfolio of sustainable and intelligent building materials, as well as digital solutions. The group's subsidiaries will also change their names to Heidelberg Materials from the beginning of 2023. Among the first to undergo the transformation will be US-based Lehigh Hanson, which will become Heidelberg Materials in early 2023.

Managing board chair Dominik von Achten said “We are proud of our cement business, but the company's range of services goes far beyond cement. Today, and even more in the future.Our future is sustainable. Our future is digital. Customer demands, markets and competitors are changing rapidly. Opportunities and challenges go beyond country borders; communication is becoming increasingly global. Differentiation opportunities arise." Concerning the company's cement business, von Achten said "We will be the first company in the world to offer carbon-free cement at large scale as early as 2024. We are vigorously driving forward the scaling of our CCUS activities: by 2030, we will reduce our CO₂ emissions by 10Mt/yr with the projects we have already launched. "

US: Lehigh Hanson has secured US$3.7m-worth of funding from the US department of energy for its planned front-end engineering design (FEED) installation of a carbon capture system at its Mitchell cement plant in Indiana. The funding was part of a total US$31m pot awarded to 10 different carbon capture projects across multiple industries. All of the projects have the capacity to capture over 95% of emissions from their respective plants.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America is supplying its carbon capture system for use at the Mitchell cement plant, at a total project cost of US$4.8m.

Congratulations are due to the National Cement Company of Alabama and Vicat for the inauguration of the new production line at the Ragland cement plant in Alabama. The event took place on 21 July 2022.

The US$300m project was originally announced in late 2019. It then took two years to build with construction starting in January 2020. Key features include a raw vertical grinding mill, a new roller mill, a five stage preheater tower, an automatic clay storage system, a 78m tall homogenisation silo, an alternative fuels storage area for tyre-derived fuel, sawdust and wood chips, a laboratory and a new control room. The new kiln was previously reported to have a clinker production capacity of 5000t/day and it will add up to 2Mt/yr of cement production capacity to the plant. ThyssenKrupp signed up as the principal equipment supplier in 2019 and H&M was the main contractor. The production line is expected to reduce energy consumption by one third. Further change is scheduled with a switch to production of Portland limestone cement (PLC) from Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) by the start of 2023.

Vicat has repeatedly noted its affection for the plant as it was the first cement plant the group purchased outside of France, back in 1974. Indeed, Vicat’s group chair and chief executive officer Guy Sidos personally managed the Ragland plant in 2001. However, rather more prosaic reasons may also have been behind the decision to expand Ragland. According to United States Geological Survey (USGS) data, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee’s cement shipments grew by nearly 5% year-on-year to 7.1Mt in 2019 from 6.8Mt in 2018. Shipments are up by 3% year-on-year to 2.5Mt in the first four months of 2022 and the three states were the fifth largest region in the US for cement shipments in April 2022. A shortage of cement was also reported in Alabama in April 2022.

The other big US-based cement plant expansion is Lehigh Hanson’s US$600m upgrade to its Mitchell plant in Indiana. It also celebrated a milestone this week with a ‘topping out’ ceremony to mark the placement of the final section of steel for the stack. Another recent achievement here was the completion of a 169,000t storage dome supplied by Dome Technologies. The supplier says that the 67m diameter and 48m tall dome is the second largest clinker storage facility in Europe and North America, after one it previous built in Romania in 2008.

The Mitchell K4 project was announced in mid-2018 and then ground breaking began in late 2019. However, the start of the coronavirus pandemic delayed construction in early 2020 before it restarted in September 2020. The revised commissioning date was then moved back about half a year to early 2023. The key part of this project is that it will replace the plant’s three current kilns with just one. The new production line will increase the site’s production capacity, reduce energy usage and decrease CO₂ emissions per tonne of cement. It was reported by local press back in 2018 that the project would increase the plant’s cement production capacity to 2.8Mt/yr. The project has been linked to supplier KHD with CCC Group as the contractor.

It’s fascinating to see two major new upgrades to cement plants emerging in a mature market like the US and during an unprecedented event like the emergence of coronavirus. No doubt compelling tales will emerge of how both teams coped with managing nine-figure capital expansion projects as a global public health emergency unfolded. The US market has been on a roll in recent years, despite all the uncertainty in the world, and so far it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. With luck both of the projects feature above have timed their opening right.

US: Lehigh Hanson’s Lehigh Cement plant in Union Bridge, Maryland plans to fully switch from Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) to Portland limestone cement (PLC) production by January 2023. It will manufacture its EcoCemPLC product. The company says that the Union Bridge plant is currently the company’s largest cement plant in North America.

The decision to move to PLC follows similar changes at the company’s Mason City plant in Iowa and three cement plants in Indiana. Lehigh Hanson produced over 2Mt of PLC in 2021 and it says it is set to double this figure in 2022.