Displaying items by tag: Oficemen

Spain: Oficemen has blamed falling exports of cement on high electricity prices. The cement association reports that exports fell by around 25% year-on-year to 3.76Mt for the first eight months of 2022 from over 5Mt in the same period in 2021. Local consumption of cement slowed to an increase of just 0.2% to 9.88Mt from 9.86Mt.

Aniceto Zaragoza, the general director of Oficemen, said “Electricity costs in our sector have increased by 400% in the last two years, a situation that worsens every day due to the energy crisis we are suffering. Without competitive electricity costs, it is impossible for our industry, which for many years has led the cement export market, to continue competing with other producers in the Mediterranean area that pay much less for their energy inputs, such as Algeria, Turkey or Egypt.”

Spain: Cement consumption grew by 2.5% year-on-year to 7.49Mt in the first half of 2022. Data from the Spanish cement association Oficemen also shows that exports fell by 21% to 2.91Mt. It said that this is the first time since 2011 that Spanish cement exports have fallen below 3Mt in the first half of the year. The association has warned of potential threats to the sector such as inflation and a recession in the second half of 2022.

Aniceto Zaragoza, the general manager of Oficemen, said “Since the Iberian Mechanism began to be applied, there has been a drop in the average price of electricity for industry, although much less significant than expected. The mechanism is capable of moderating the price of the wholesale market, but the lack of wind generation caused by the heat wave and the consequent increase in the use of combined cycles, together with the increase in the price of gas, makes a global reform necessary of the European electricity market.”

The data on cement consumption for 2021 in Spain is out this week and it looks promising. As the national cement association Oficemen explained, last year was the sector’s best for over a decade, nearly reaching 15Mt consumption and exceeding the figure in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic started. Oficemen also singled out particular strong performance in December 2021. It now expects this growth trend to continue into 2022 with a forecast of 5% to 15.6Mt predicted based on both domestic and infrastructure segments.

Graph 1: Cement consumption in Spain, 2012 – 2021. Source: Oficemen.

The Spanish cement industry reached a peak consumption of over 50Mt in the late 2000s before hitting a near-50 year low in the 2010s in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The market then started to recover in the second half of the 2010s until Covid-19 came along. A report on the Spanish cement market to the start of 2021 that lays out the situation can be found in the February 2021 issue of Global Cement Magazine. The larger news stories since then have been Votorantim Cimentos’ growth in the market through its acquisitions of FYM and Cementos Balboa, and Çimsa Çimento’s final completion of its deal to buy the Buñol white cement plant from Cemex. Each of these stories involve an integrated cement plant changing ownership.

Looking back at Oficemen’s summary describing 2012 depicts a much different dwindling market. However, one commonality it shares with the association’s roundup for 2021 is that it complains about the country’s disadvantage in electricity costs compared to its neighbours. Back in 2012 this was framed as holding back exports. As Oficemen noted at the time it exported 5.9Mt of cement in 2012, less than half the 13Mt it exported in 1983. Jump forward to 2021 and exports are now 6.8Mt. Energy is still a key issue though. Now Oficemen’s president, José Manuel Cascajero Rodríguez, says that the sector’s production costs have increased by 25% since the latest round of electricity price rises began. He then compares the cost of energy intensive industry in Spain unfavourably against France and Germany and calls for a structural change in the Spanish electricity market to make prices more predictable. Cement producers elsewhere in Europe and beyond may share Oficemen’s concerns regard unpredictable energy prices over the last six months but electricity has been a particular issue for Spain for a long time. To take one recent local example, in November 2021 Cementos Cosmos said it was planning to scale down the production of clinker at its Córdoba cement plant as a result of the high cost of electricity.

The other issue that gets raised in Oficemen’s 2021 summary is competition from cement importers outside the European Union (EU) and the necessity of a border carbon adjustment mechanism (CBAM) to take in account carbon taxation for producers within Europe. To jump back a bit, back in May 2021 the EU Emissions trading Scheme (ETS) reached Euro50/t. Then in December 2021 Cembureau, the European cement association, published a calculation predicting that if the EU ETS CO₂ cost made it to Euro90/t then this could represent 12 - 15% of the production costs of cement producers. Well, as readers will have guessed, the EU ETS beat Euro90/t on 2 February 2022 and then rose to Euro96.7/t on 7 February 2022. Answers in an email for when readers think the EU ETS price will top Euro100/t.

All of the above feeds neatly into the week’s other big Spanish news story: Cemex and Synhelion have successfully produced clinker from concentrated solar radiation at a pilot unit at the Very High Concentration Solar Tower of IMDEA Energy near Madrid. It’s early days yet as the process needs to be scaled up but, make no mistake, this is a big story. An interview with the team behind Cemex and Synhelion’s solar concentration project can be found in the December 2020 issue of Global Cement Magazine for more information. The SOLPART (Solar-Heated Reactors for Industrials Production of Reactive Particulates) project in France did similar research a few years ago but it didn’t reach the 1500°C target required to reach the sintering phase where clumps of clinker form. US-based Heliogen has been trying to industrialise concentrated solar energy but not much has been heard about its cement-industry ambitions since it said it reached temperatures of about 1000°C in 2019.

The relevance of an eventual full-scale concentrated solar unit for the entire production line or just the preheater and/or calciner at a cement plant in Spain makes considerable sense. At a stroke energy costs are reduced, diverted to a renewable source and any desired CO₂ capture becomes, in theory, easier and cheaper. Cemex said in the interview with Global Cement Magazine that the tentative next step would be a pilot unit at a cement plant, although, candidate plants could be in the US or Mexico, as well as Spain. Another side of the drive to cut energy and carbon costs can also be seen in a couple of photovoltaic solar projects supplying cement plants that were announced in 2021 for Spanish plants run by Cemex and Cementos Cosmos.

We leave the Spanish cement sector in a growth phase but with plenty of challenges ahead, not least from electricity costs and the mounting cost of carbon. Yet in common with other countries in Europe the industry faces a high-wire balancing act between staying economically viable and inching towards net zero. It’s conceivable that an industrial scale concentrated solar unit at a cement plant in Spain by 2030 might steady the wobbles along the way.

Spain: Spain’s cement demand grew by 11% year-on-year to 14.9Mt in 2021, up by 1.4% from pre-pandemic levels of 14.7Mt in 2019. The Spanish cement association Oficemen has forecast a 4.7% rise to 15.6Mt in 2022 due to an increase in approved housing units and infrastructure projects.

The El Economista newspaper has reported that Spanish cement production capacity utilisation was 50% in 2021. Production costs were approximately 25% higher the before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Spain: Spain’s 10-month cement consumption was 12.5Mt in 2021, up by 12% year-on-year from 10-month 2020 levels. Interempresas News has reported that consumption grew by 10% year-on-year in October 2021 to 1.3Mt from 1.18Mt. During the month, exports fell by 14% year-on-year to 581,000t from 485,000t.

Spain: Turkey-based Çimsa has joined Oficemen, the Spanish Cement Industry Association. It follows its acquisition of Cemex’s Buñol white cement plant in June 2021, according to Europa Press. The agreement to buy the plant was delayed from 2019 due to the international aspects of the deal and competition concerns.

Spain: Oficemen, the Spanish cement association, has elected José Manuel Cascajero Rodríguez as its president. He succeeded Víctor García Brosa, general director deputy to the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Cementos Portland Valderrivas Group, in the role. Cascajero Rodríguez has been in post since July 2021.

Cascajero Rodríguez has worked for Cemex for over 20 years in a variety of roles. His international career began in 2005 in the UK, as the Director of Treasury for Europe and Asia, and in 2012 he was appointed Corporate Treasurer of Cemex in Mexico. Since 2016, he has been responsible for Strategic Planning for Europe, the Middle East and Asia, a position he combines with the presidency of Cemex’s Spanish operations. He holds a degree in Business Administration and Management from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a Master of Business Administration degree from ESCP Europe in France.

Spain: Consumption of cement in the first eight months of 2021 was 9.58Mt nationally, up by 13% year-on-year from 8.48Mt in the first eight months of 2020. The Spanish Cement Industry Association (Oficemen) says that consumption remains 2% below pre-Covid-19 outbreak levels in the corresponding period of 2019. The El Economista newspaper has reported that the association has forecast full-year cement consumption of 14.6Mt in 2020, slightly below the full-year 2019 figure of 14.7Mt.

President José Cascajero said "These levels put us on the path to have a growth in future years that is hopeful. The recovery of infrastructure, which has returned to being the primary source of demand, and residential building, has allowed both consumption and expectations to be substantially improved since April 2021.”

In 2022, he forecast year-on-year demand growth of 3 - 5%, due in part to the positive impacts of the EU post-Covid-19 outbreak recovery fund. Cascajero warned of the increasing burden of rising electricity prices and CO2 emissions fees and called for ‘structural reforms’ to mitigate their drag on growth.

Spain: Cement consumption grew by 17% year-on-year to 7.31Mt of cement in the first half of 2021 from 6.23Mt in the same period in 2020. Oficemen, the Spanish cement association, said that the figure for 2021 remained 1.4% below the same period in 2019 though. However, the consumption in June 2021 was looking promising compared to both the same month in 2020 and 2019. Exports increased by 36% to 3.8Mt in the reporting period. The association celebrated this figure but warned that high electricity and CO2 taxes could potentially have a negative effect on future exports by the sector.

Spain: Cement consumption grew by 120% year-on-year to 1.24Mt of cement in April 2021 from 0.57Mt in April 2020. Oficemen, the Spanish cement association, says that the rise continues a pre-coronavirus positive trend, representing an increase of 3% from April 2019 levels. It added that the demand was the highest of any April since 2011. The association nonetheless urged caution in light of a 4% drop in four-month cement demand levels compared with the first four months of 2019, and a more moderate 25% increase year-on-year from 2020 levels.

In April 2021, Spanish producers exported 812,000t of cement, up by 230% from 248,000t in April 2020.