Displaying items by tag: Norway
FLSmidth enters service contract with Norwegian plant
01 October 2015Norway: FLSmidth has agreed with HeidelbergCement on a one year service agreement contract to support its Norcem cement plant in Kjøpsvik, Norway. The plant is the most northerly in the world. An FLSmidth team will monitor the plant and diagnose and advise the Kjøpsvik-based operators in real-time. This will enable improvement in performance, increased availability and reduced operating costs.
"Optimising equipment performance is difficult without access to a wide range of specialists," said Skage Hem, FLSmidth's vice president for Global Research and Development. "It is not easy for customers with plants in remote corners of the world to recruit specialists. We have an experienced global specialist team ready to support the customers at all
hours of the day anywhere in the world."
Service is increasingly important for FLSmidth and is a growing business. In the last quarter alone service business across FLSmidth grew by 24% compared with the same quarter of 2014. Although global growth has slowed down, the equipment of many of its existing customers still needs to be maintained and optimised in order to increase plant productivity. With more than 90% of the lifecycle cost of cement plants being operating expenditure cost, service agreements are an area of continued growth potential for FLSmidth.
Read Global Cement's visit report from the Kjøpsvik plant here.
Yara acquires STRABAG’s flue gas cleaning division
04 June 2014Norway/Austria: Yara International intends to acquire the flue gas cleaning division of STRABAG SE, in a move that consolidates Yara's position as a global, full-service emissions-to-air control company. STRABAG stated that it is selling its flue gas cleaning division in order to focus on its core construction business.
"Our acquisition of STRABAG's flue gas cleaning division will increase our capacities in, and beyond, NOx control systems. It will also give us access to great teams in key growth markets like Asia and Eastern Europe, where we can help customers meet increasingly stringent environmental regulations," said Yves Bonte, Senior Vice-President and head of Yara's Industrial Segment.
With flue gas cleaning, Yara can provide an end-to-end service that includes the production of Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) and Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction (SNCR) systems to reduce Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) emissions, along with the reagents needed to operate them.
The STRABAG acquisition is part of Yara's broader strategic direction to invest in products and services that address the related issues of environment, resources and food security. In January 2014 Yara acquired H+H Umwelt-und-Industrietechnik GmbH, which primarily produces SCR systems to reduce Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) emissions on ships. In April 2014 Yara also took a majority stake in Green Tech Marine, a leading Sulphur Oxide (SOx) scrubber supplier to the marine industry.
The transaction is subject to approval by the Austrian competition authority and other regulatory approvals. It is expected to be completed by the end of August 2014.
Norway: Oil and gas industry engineering firm Aker Solutions has won a contract to test and study the capture of CO2 from flue gas emitted at Norcem's cement plant in Brevik, Norway. The award from the HeidelbergCement subsidiary, in cooperation with the European Cement Research Academy (ECRA) marks the first time technology to capture CO2 will be used at a cement production plant.
Aker Solutions will perform long-term testing on the actual flue gas to select optimum chemical solvent for high content CO2 flue gas at the plant. Tests will be performed with Aker Solutions' in-house developed Mobile Test Unit (MTU). The MTU is a CO2 capture plant that includes all processes and functions found in a large scale commercial plant.
ECRA members chose Norcem Brevik as the site for ECRA operational CO2-capture test project. The project is supported and partly financed by the CLIMIT programme, which is managed by Gassnova in cooperation with the Research Council of Norway.
Aker Solutions has developed CO2-technology solutions since the early 1990s. A separate company, Aker Clean Carbon, was established in 2007 as a company under Aker ASA to commercialise carbon capture technology. Aker Solutions took full ownership of Aker Clean Carbon in 2012 and carbon capture and storage activities are an integrated part of Aker Solutions.