Displaying items by tag: Plant

Egypt: Misr Beni Suef Cement has ended a contract with Arab Swiss Engineering Company (ASEC). In April 2019 the companies signed a contract for ASEC to provide technical management at the producer’s plant. Reuters News has reported that the cement company will now undertake the operation of its production lines.

Saudi Arabia: Yanbu Cement has started a two months modernisation project on Line 4 at its integrated Yanbu plant. The company said that dispatches would not be affected by the stoppage due to sufficient clinker stocks. Line 5, which represents 60% of the company's total capacity at the plant, will continue production at full capacity.

The cement producer reported that its sales fell by 4% year-on-year to US$251m in 2020 from US$260m in 2019. Its net profit after zakat and tax grew by 9% to US$74.9m from US$68.7m.

France: Vicat recorded full-year consolidated sales of Euro2.81bn in 2020, up by 2% year-on-year from Euro2.74bn in 2019. Earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 6% to Euro557m from Euro526m. Consolidated net income rose by 8% to Euro172m from Euro160m.

The group said that organic sales were ‘strong,’ rising in all regions except in France, by 6% in total. It attributed the decline to a near-total shutdown due to the coronavirus outbreak in mid-March 2020, which lifted incrementally throughout the first half of the year. Vicat France’s cement business recovered ‘robustly’ in the second half of 2020, resulting in an operational sales increase of 3% for the year. Full stoppages of activity lasted for 33 days in India and for 30 days in Italy. Despite these challenges, business growth, cost-cutting and lower energy costs drove earnings growth, with ‘very sharp improvements’ recorded in the Americas and in Asia. Additionally, the ramp-up of a new grinding plant in Mali and production performance improvements in Senegal supported a ‘significant’ earnings increase in Africa.

Chair and chief executive officerGuy Sidos said, “Thanks to our employees’ tremendous efforts and commitment, the Vicat group strengthened its position amid the unprecedented current pandemic situation. Our resilience and flexibility allowed us to make organisational changes in order to reconcile our competing imperatives of keeping everyone safe and healthy, unlocking savings and making rapid adjustments, such as relocating our Paris head office to L’Isle d’Abeau in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Likewise, we made improvements to Vicat’s governance and stepped up our environmental and digital transformation programmes. Given the strength of our cash generation, we were able to resume key productivity investment programmes for the future. Despite the adversity we faced, our teams across all our various regions successfully delivered higher production efficiency levels and met market demand cost-effectively, paving the way for a solid increase in the Vicat group’s results.”

In 2021, the group plans to expand cement production and invest in new cement terminals in India and to continue with the upgrade of its Ragland cement plant in the US. It also says that it will ramp up projects aimed at meeting its carbon footprint reduction targets. The group expects its earnings to rise at constant scope and exchange rates over the full year.

Dominican Republic/Philippines: Cemex says that it will commission two new energy saving installations at cement plants in the Dominican Republic and the Philippines in 2021. In the Dominican Republic, a new 41MW solar power plant will partly supply the company’s cement operations in the country. In the Philippines, it will commission a 4.5MW waste heat recovery (WHR) plant at its APO cement plant.

US: HeidelbergCement subsidiary Lehigh Cement has resumed work on an expansion at its 0.8Mt/yr Mitchell, Indiana cement plant with the execution of initial project plans and the delivery of materials to the site. Local media has reported that the upgrade will cost US$600m and create 1000 construction jobs over a four year project timeline.

Mitchell cement plant manager Tracy Crowther said, “We are currently receiving parts and over the summer this will continue to get busier. Much of the equipment will come in through a port near Louisville and will be hauled by truck up here. There will be some large equipment that will be moved in.”

On April 2020 it was reported that Lehigh Cement had suspended work on a 2.0Mt/yr expansion of the Mitchell plant to 2.8Mt/yr, on which it had broken ground in October 2019. The scheduled completion date moved to late 2023 from September 2022.

China: Germany-based supplier IKN says that its customer Jidong Group has started up a 6200t/day-capacity cooler at its Lincheng cement plant in Hebei province. The supplier also said that installation of another cooler for the cement producer for a new production line was underway and scheduled for completion later in 2021.Jidong Group completes IKN cooler installation

Belarus: Belarusian Cement Company subsidiary Krasnoselskstroimaterialy has reported total costs savings across its operations of Euro1.34m in 2020. Belarus: Daily News has reported that the company undertook several and diverse measures to achieve the reduction.

The company said, "We have replaced imported bottom ash mix with high-aluminium clay from our own deposit.” It added, “The coal content of the fuel mix rose to 85%. We have also optimised the use of raw materials in the production of cinder blocks. This has helped to reduce the cost of their production by means of decreasing the usage rates for cement, lime and thermal energy."

US: France-based Vicat subsidiary National Cement Company of Alabama has completed the installation of a new 5000t/day clinker line at its Ragland, Alabama cement plant. The line has a raw meal capacity of 13,000t.

Vicat engineering senior vice president Jean-Claude Brocheton congratulated the installation team on the ‘major step’ and on completing the work ahead of schedule.

India: Denmark-based Hasle has supplied a Hasle D59A coating-resistant castable to Asian Cement for use on the inlet chamber and riser duct at its cement plant. The supplier supervised installation. It said that the castable will reduce the required lining materials of the equipment, resulting in savings.

The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) looked like it might be about to hit Euro40/t this week. It still might. You can blame it on the current cold front bringing snow to much of Northern Europe and the bedding into of the fourth phase of the ETS that started in January 2021. In early 2020 analysts were generally predicting an average price of around Euro30/t by 2030 bolstered by volatility in the price due to the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the price recovered and so did the European Commission’s resolve to push through its European Green Deal. By mid-December 2020 the price had shot past Euro30/t and analysts were forecasting average prices of well over Euro50/t by 2030. Depending on one’s disposition this is the rate at which either serious decarbonisation attempts will begin to be viable for commercial companies, or the point at which more plants simply close.

Figure 1: European Union Emissions Trading System carbon market price in Euros (European Union Allowance), February 2020 – February 2021. Source: Sandbag.

One group which is well aware of the EU ETS and its consequences upon the cement industry is Cembureau, the European cement association. Some of its current lobbying efforts have been directed at trying to shape how the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) will appear in legislation proposals in June 2021. Its argument boils down to protecting its members from carbon leakage both in and out of the EU’s borders and maintaining free allocation until 2030 to ease the transition to a lower carbon economy. The former should find common ground. However, calls for a CO₂ charge exemption for EU exporters may perplex environmentalists, who might wonder how this could possibly encourage third party countries to introduce their own carbon pricing schemes. The latter is clearly pragmatism for an industry saying that it is facing change at a pace that may be too rapid for it to cope with. Concrete products do carry sustainability advantages over other building materials. Wiping out swathes of the region’s production base, simply because one knows exactly how much CO₂ they emit compared to rival building materials that one doesn’t, may not help the EU reach its climate commitments by 2050. As if to underline this fear, another European clinker line was earmarked for closure this week when Lafarge France announced the planned conversion of the Contes cement plant into a terminal.

Figure 2: Estimate of global cement production in 2018 by region. Source: Cembureau.

Figure 2 above puts the situation into a global perspective, showing that Cembureau’s members were responsible for below 7% of cement production in 2018. China produced an estimated 55% of global cement production in the same year. In terms of overall CO₂ emissions across all sources, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that China produced 30% of CO₂ emissions in 2018.

It seems odd then that the introduction of an interim ETS in China at the start of February 2021 didn’t receive more global news coverage. The new scheme covers 2225 power companies across the country. It follows pilot regional schemes that have run since 2011, covering seven provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong. Previously, the country’s largest local carbon market, the China Emissions Exchange (Guangzhou), was based in Guangdong province and it included power generation, cement, steel, and petrochemical sectors. State news agency Xinhua reports that this scheme reduced carbon emissions from these industries by 12% from 2013 to 2019. The new national ETS is expected to include cement and other industries at a later stage.

Commentators in the European press have pointed out that the Chinese national ETS is actually planning to make an effort on transparency and to force companies to publish their pollution data publicly. Yet, they’ve also said that the data may be inaccurate anyway, echoing the usual Western fears about Chinese figures. Other concerns include the method of giving out pollution permits rather than allocating them by auction as in other cap and trade systems, which could reduce the incentive to reduce emissions. It’s also worth pointing out that carbon was priced at US$6/t under the Chinese system compared to around US$35/t in the EU and US$17/t in California, US at the end of 2020. At this price it seems unlikely that the Chinese national ETS will encourage much change without other measures.

The EU and Chinese ETS are at different stages but the differences in scale are stark. When or if the Chinese one goes national across those eight core industries it will likely leapfrog over the EU ETS and become the world’s largest with an estimated 13,235MtCO₂e under its purview. By contrast, the EU ETS manages 1816MtC0₂e according to World Bank data. The kind of dilemmas Cembureau and others are tackling with the EU ETS such as carbon leakage and how fast to tighten the system against heavy emitters are illustrative to other schemes in China and elsewhere.