Displaying items by tag: Plant

Mexico: France’s Fives has issued an update on the two raw meal grinding plants it is supplying to Cruz Azul’s Hidalgo and Oaxaca Lagunas cement plants.

Construction work at the Oaxaca Lagunas plant started in August 2018. Mechanical erection of the raw materials feeding workshop and the FCB Horomill grinding circuit started in July 2019. Electrical installation is currently under progress. The raw meal grinding workshop is scheduled to be operational by the end of March 2020.

Construction work at the Hidalgo plant started in December 2018. Mechanical erection started at the end of August 2019, electrical erection works will start in December 2019. First raw meal date is scheduled by the end of May 2020.

Both orders were finalised in November 2017. The Hidalgo plant ordered a 280t/hr grinding unit and the Oaxaca Lagunas plant has ordered a 300t/hr grinding unit. Each raw grinding plant features an FCB Horomill 4000mm grinding mill, a FCB TSV Classifier 6500 mm and a FCB Aerodecantor.

Mali: Diamond Cement Mali (DCM) has signed a deal with La Société Malienne de Cartonnerie (SCS MDC) to procure 50kg bags to hold cement. DCM operates two plants in the country with a production capacity of 1Mt/yr, according to local press. It requires over 20 million bags per year. SCS MDC became operational locally in 2019. It runs a plant at Kamalé near Bamako. Moussa Silvain Diakité, the chief executive oficer (CEO) of SCS MDC described the contract as the company’s first ‘big’ deal.

UAE: India-based JSW Cement has applied to borrow between US$50m and US$55m from two UAE-based banks to continue development on its planned 1Mt/yr integrated Fujairah plant, the capacity of which it plans to double to 2Mt/yr within a year of its scheduled January 2020 opening. Arabian Business has reported that the loan will bring the project’s total investment to US$110m with a 30:70 equity/debt ratio. The government has granted JSW Cement a 35-year quarry lease and a licence for the extraction of up to 6Mt/yr of limestone for use at the plant, which will be served by a Terex MPS 1200t/hr crushing plant.
550 local people directly or indirectly employed in cement production at Fujairah.

Germany: Four of Europe’s leading cement producers have partnered to found and operate a 100% carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at Schwenk Zement’s 1.0Mt/yr Mergelstetten plant in southern Germany. HeidelbergCement has announced that the catch4climate project will enter operation in 2020.

US: A fire was successfully fought at Lehigh Cement’s 0.8Mt/yr integrated Tehachapi plant near Bakersfield, California on 8 December 2019. The Bakersfield Californian has reported that there were no injuries and no cause of the fire has been identified. Access difficulties exacerbated by extreme weather conditions caused fire crews to make two additional assistance calls.

Netherlands: Germany’s HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary Eerste Nederland Cement Industrie (ENCI) announced on 9 December 2019 the upcoming closure of its former 1.8Mt/yr integrated Maastricht plant in 2020. Het Belang van Limburg has reported that the Maastricht plant, which stepped down to grinding-only in March 2019 after 91 years’ kiln operation, received an insufficient supply of clinker from ENCI’s sister company CBR Cement’s 1.5Mt/yr Lixhe plant in Wallonia, Belgium to guarantee profitable production.

Clinker grinding continues at ENCI’s 1.4Mt/yr IJmuiden and 0.6Mt/yr Rotterdam grinding plants, each of which has better access to clinker imports due to their proximity to deepwater ports.

Cemex pushed ahead yesterday and announced that it had sold the Kosmos Cement Company to Eagle Materials for around US$665m. It owns a 75% stake in the company, with Italy’s Buzzi Unicem owning the remaining share, giving it roughly US$449m once the deal completes. Proceeds from the sale will go towards debt reduction and general corporate purposes. The sale inventory includes a 1.7Mt/yr integrated cement plant in Louisville, Kentucky as well as seven distribution terminals and raw material reserves.

The decision to sell assets makes sense given Cemex’s financial results so far in 2019. It reported falling sales, cement volumes and earnings in the first nine months of the year although much of this was down to poor market conditions in Mexico. However, the US, along with Europe, was one of its stronger territories with rising sales. Earnings were impaired in the US, possibly due to bad weather in the southeast and competition in Florida, but infrastructure and residential development were reported to be promising.

Graph 1: Portland & Blended Cement shipments in 2018 and 2019. Source: United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Graph 2: Change in imports of hydraulic cement & clinker to the US in 2018 and 2019 from selected countries. Source: USGS.

United States Geological Survey (USGS) data also supports a picture of a growing US market. Shipments of Ordinary Portland Cement and blended cements grew by 2.4% year-on-year to 66.9Mt for the first eight months of 2019 from 65.4Mt in the same period in 2018. By region growth can be seen in the North-East, South and imports. Declines were reported in the West and Midwest. The states of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee – the area where the Kosmos plant is located – saw shipments grow by 4% to 4.77Mt from 4.58Mt. It is worth noting that Louisville is in the north of Kentucky near the border with Indiana, where shipments also grew.

The Portland Cement Association’s (PCA) fall forecast may also have helped Cemex’s decision. Ed Sullivan, PCA Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, said that he expected cement consumption in the US to continue growing in 2019 and 2020 but with a slowing trend into 2021 following general gross domestic product (GDP) predictions. The PCA’s view is that pent-up demand following the recession in 2008 was gone and the economy was gradually weakening. Crucially though it didn’t think a recession was impending. In this scenario Cemex might be taking a medium-term view with regards to the Kosmos Cement Company.

Another more general interesting data point from the USGS was the change in import origins to the US. Imports grew by 11.3% to 66.9Mt in January to August 2019. The top five importing countries and their overall share remained the same but there was some movement between them. Turkish and Mexican imports surged at the expensive of Chinese ones as can be seen in Graph 2. The go-to explanation for this would be the on-going US - China trade war. Cemex is a Mexican company with a strong presence in both the US and Mexico. This change in the make-up of the import market in the US may also have informed its decision to sell Kosmos Cement as it looked at the macro scale.

More generally the US market is looking buoyant in the short to medium term. Plants are being sold like Kosmos Cement to Eagle Cement and the Keystone cement plant in Bath, Pennsylvania to HeidelbergCement and a major upgrade project is underway on the new production line at the Mitchell plant in Indiana. In Cemex’s case, as ever with asset sales, the seller sometimes has to make the hard decision of whether to divest a plant in a growing region to help the business in other places that might not be doing so well. The growth of America’s largest locally owned producer, Eagle Cement, may also give cheer to the US’ current ‘America First’ administration.

US: Cemex says it has agreed to sell the Kosmos Cement Company to Eagle Materials for around US$665m. The Mexican company owns a 75% stake in the company and Italy’s Buzzi Unicem manages the remainder. It expects to receive US$499m from the transaction. This will be spent on debt reduction and for general corporate purposes. The sale includes the 1.7Mt/yr Kosmos integrated cement plant in Louisville, Kentucky as well as seven distribution terminals and raw material reserves.

“This is another key milestone in achieving our ‘A Stronger Cemex’ objectives. Now, closed or announced asset sales are in excess of US$1.3bn under this program. We are pleased with the continued favourable asset-divestment dynamics in our industry,” said Fernando A Gonzalez, chief executive officer (CEO) of Cemex.

Completion of the deal is subject to regulatory approval. It is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2020.

Russia: Eurocement’s Maltsovsky integrated plant in Bryansk Region has gained European certification for its CEMI 52.5N, CEMI 42.5R and CEMII / A-S 42.5N products. Local testing and independent certification confirmed the new designation. Following an earlier certification for CEMI 42.5N the plant now hopes to grow its exports to the European Union.

Kenya: Mombasa Cement has completed construction of a 36MW wind farm consisting of 12 3MW turbines in Vipingo. Bahrain News Agency has reported that the plant will power Mombasa Cement’s 1.6Mt/yr integrated Vipingo cement plant, with surplus to be sold to the state-owned power provider Kenya Power. The power plant will supply electricity for the completion of Mombasa Cement’s planned US$73m upgrade to its grey cement clinker production process at the Vipingo plant.