Displaying items by tag: Plant

Spain: LafargeHolcim España says that a planned Euro8m investment to its Sagunto integrated cement plant is dependent on talks with the Valencian local government on the medium and long-term use of its quarry. Plant director José Luis Coleto said that this expenditure is part of a Euro20m package that LafargeHolcim has scheduled for the country until 2022. He added that the plant has spent Euro3.5m on the plant in 2019 on control systems upgrades and installation of an automated laboratory.

South Korea: Asia Cement has awarded a contract to Germany’s Humboldt Wedag, a subsidiary of KHD Humboldt Wedag International, to supply and provide engineering for the modernisation of its third clinker production line at its Jecheon plant. The target of the upgrade project is to increase the alternative fuel substitution rate to above 85% of calciner fuel, as well as the reduction of NOx to satisfy local emission limits.

KHD’s scope includes the engineering and supply of mechanical equipment for the clinker production as well as electrical equipment for the overall modernisation of the production process. During the project, the existing preheater will be modernised with the installation of a new Pyroclon R calciner, as well as a Pyrorotor rotary combustion reactor for low-processed alternative fuel.

The overall project scope consists of: a Pyroclon R calciner with Pyrotop mixing chamber; a Pyrorotor alternative fuel combustion reactor; a Pyrobox coal firing system for process start-up and operation balancing; replacement of stage five cyclones with new high-efficiency cyclones for calciner connection and an overall pressure drop reduction; bypass mixing chamber installation; and a new kiln inlet chamber with orifice.

The commissioning of the modernised production line is planned for the first quarter of 2021.

Tunisia: Brazil’s Votorantim Cimentos has ordered a clinker cooler and clinker roller crushers from Turkey’s Fons Technology International for an upgrade to its 1.2Mt/yr integrated Jbel Oust plant. Votorantim has been present in Tunisia since 2012 where it sells cement under the Jbel Oust brand.

Cyprus: Vassiliko Cement has launched an 8MWh photovoltaic solar plant. It is located in a former quarry in the Amalas area, approximately 8km from its cement plant. The unit is expected to supply around 10% of the cement plant’s electricity requirements. The project had an investment of around Euro6.5m. The lead contractor on the project was Sunel.

Canada: McInnis Cement, Écotech Québec and the Gaspésie Cleantech Hub, in collaboration with the Québec Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation, have launched a call for innovations to identify carbon capture and utilisation technologies for the Port-Daniel-Gascons, McInnis cement plant. This call for innovations will run until May 2020 and then selected organisations will be invited to explore future options.

“From the moment the company was founded, McInnis Cement has been exploring the option of replacing some of the hydrocarbons used as fuel for the plant with locally generated residual forest biomass so as to reduce its environmental emissions,” said Maryse Tremblay, Director of Communications and Corporate Social Responsibility at McInnis Cement. She added that a study to verify the feasibility of using this type of alternative fuels is underway and that this may be followed by a pilot project.

Écotech Québec is a non-profit organisation, funded by the provincial government, which represents Québec's ‘clean’ technology cluster. It supports businesses, researchers, investors and associations to help accelerate the development, financing and commercialisation of clean technologies. The Gaspésie Cleantech Hub is an economic development organisation created to help the region increase the economic benefits of establishing the McInnis cement plant.

Colombia: Finland’s Wärtsilä has signed a further four-year extension to its operation and maintenance (O&M) agreement with Cemex Colombia. The original agreement was started in 1998 and it has now been extended to the end of 2023. Cemex’s integrated Caracolito cement plant uses a 26MW power plant operating on five Wärtsilä 18-cylinder 34SG engines in V-configuration running on natural gas. Wärtsilä employs 15 personnel in the running of the power plant, all of whom were hired locally.

Nirma Group won the auction for Emami Cement this week with an US$770m offer. The deal is subject to approval by the Competition Commission of India but it signals further consolidation for the Indian cement industry. It sets Nirma Group and its subsidiary Nuvoco Vistas in a strong position in Central, North and East regions of the country, if authorities agree to it.

Sometimes the press releases connected to corporate acquisitions can be accused of hyperbole but Nuvoco’s chairman Hiren Patel may be proved closer to reality than some when he said, “This acquisition is a momentous and transformational step in Nuvoco’s journey to becoming a major building materials company in India.” This is because Emami Cement operates one integrated cement plant in Risdah, Chhattisgarh and grinding units in Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha with a total installed capacity of 8.3Mt/yr. It also holds mining leases in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. Nuvoco Vistas runs four integrated plants in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan and three grinding plants in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Haryana with a total installed capacity of around 15.2Mt/yr.

Put all of this together and Nuvoco Vistas has a capacity of 23.5Mt/yr. This may not make it a leader nationally, where it faces the likes of UltraTech Cement’s capacity of just under 110Mt/yr. Yet it does make the producer a serious player regionally in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Backing this up are five grinding plants in East India. Hence, Hiren Patel might not be exaggerating all that much.

It’s difficult to ascertain the valuation of this deal given the mixture of integrated and grinding capacity that was on sale. Altogether, for its total of US$770m, Nirma Group has agreed to pay around US$93/t. Like any deal there must have been some haggling going on given that the projected price for Emami Cement drifted downwards as the auction went on. Emami Cement’s owners reportedly valued the company at around US$1.2bn before the auction and were subsequently said to be looking for US$1bn. Later, local media said that UltraTech Cement was likely to submit an offer around US$0.94bn.

In the wider context of the Indian cement industry, the picture looks similar to when this column looked at the country as a whole in December 2019. Since then the November 2019 production figures have been released showing that cement production grew in the first 11 months of 2019, to 308Mt, but at a far slower rate than in 2018. A growth in production in November 2019 also broke a downward trend since August 2019. Adding to this growing sense of optimism, analysts ICRA were forecasting increasing profitability for cement producers in the 2020 financial year due to ‘benign’ input costs. If correct then Nirma Group will have picked a good time to expand.

India: HeidelbergCement India’s revenue grew by 4% year-on-year to US$221m in the nine months to 31 December 2019 from US$232m in the same period in 2018. Its sales volumes fell by 1.9% to 1.22Mt from 1.29Mt. Its net profit rose by 26% to US$22.4m from US$28.3m. The subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement said that, despite a fall in revenue in the quarter to 31 December 2019, a decrease in petcoke prices and an increase in power generation from waste heat recovery systems, had helped to keep costs under control.

The cement producer added that de-bottlenecking work at its grinding mills at Imlai in Madhya Pradesh and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh is expected to be completed by the end of March 2020. Following completion of the project the company’s total cement grinding capacity will be 6.26Mt/yr.

US: Cemex says that a class action lawsuit filed with the Southern District Court of New York in 2018 has been dismissed. The legal action was made by a group of investors who allege that they were misled in relation to an alleged corruption case in Colombia. The building materials company said that the decision of the court was final and that the plaintiffs would not be entitled to a new trial,

The legal proceedings followed reports in 2018 that the US Department of Justice had requested information from Cemex about a case of alleged corruption in the construction of the Maceo cement plant in Colombia. In 2016 Cemex fired several senior staff members in relation to the Maceo project and its subsidiary’s chief executive resigned. This followed an internal audit and investigation into payments worth around US$20m made to a non-governmental third party in connection with the acquisition of the land, mining rights and benefits of the tax free zone for the project.

China: On 9 February 2020 Taiwan Cement announced the extended suspension of operations at some of its Chinese plants closed due to the coronavirus outbreak to 16 February 2020. Taiwan Cement acknowledged the possibility of ‘some effects on financial figures this year,’ but said that it had adopted the measures to minimise the effect of the outbreak on operations.