Displaying items by tag: Plant

US: Argos USA’s Harleyville cement plant in South Carolina and Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua’s (GCC) Pueblo plant in Colorado have been awarded Energy Star certification by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the first time. Altogether 100 manufacturing plants across different industries earned the certification in 2018.

24 cement plants received the certification in 13 states. These cement companies included Alamo Cement, Argos USA, Buzzi Unicem, CalPortland, Cemex, Continental Cement, GCC, Holcim US, Lehigh Cement, Salt River Materials and Titan America.

“America’s cement manufacturers’ commitment to sustainable manufacturing have led to improved equipment reliability, energy efficiency, and the increased the use of alternative fuels,” said Portland Cement Association president and chief executive officer (CEO) Mike Ireland.

Paraguay: Businessman José Ortíz says that Denmark’s FLSmidth will supply equipment for a new 1Mt/yr cement plant being built in Concepción. He made the comments in a radio interview, according to La Nacion newspaper. The unit is expected to be commissioned in mid-2021 and it has an investment of US$180m. The project is being financed by the Cartes Group, the Jiménez Gaona Group and José Ortiz. Jorge Mendez, the former president of state-owned cement producer Industria Nacional del Cemento (INC), will be president of the new plant.

Zambia: Zambezi Portland Cement has spent Euro23m on an upgrade to its plant. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Gomeli Litana said that the upgrade was necessary due to the high demand for cement, according to the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation. He added that the expansion was likely to reduce the cost of cement.

China: Starlinger Plastics Machinery Taicang, the Chinese branch of Austria’s Starlinger, has reached the milestone of building 10,000 circular looms. It reached this target in November 2018. The plant was established in 2005 and started manufacturing looms in 2006. It produces around 1000 looms/yr. Omega 6 and Omega 1000 model looms were first produced at Starlinger Taicang. This was then followed by the RX series, which is produced exclusively in China.

Paraguay: Cementos Concepción plans to build a 1Mt/yr plant in Concepción at a cost of US$180m. The new company has been set up by businessman José Ortíz, according to the Hoy newspaper. The capital for the plant is being provided by the Cartes Group, the Jiménez Gaona Group and José Ortiz. The project is currently sourcing equipment for the plant and the plant is expected to be operational by 2021.

Guatemala: Cementos Progreso says that its new San Gabriel cement plant is currently being tested. Plant manager Heber Barrios Valenzuela said that this stage of its set-up began in 2018 and will continue throughout 2019, according to the Prensa Libre newspaper. The unit had an investment of US$500m. Work on the project started in 2008 and construction work began in 2013.

The new integrated cement plant will have a clinker production capacity of 4500t/day when fully operational. Key features include a 1.5km conveyor from the quarry to the plant with a capacity of 1000t/hr. After raw material grinding, pre-heating, the kiln and the cooler the production line has a 70,000t clinker silo. This is followed by two vertical cement grinding mills, each with a capacity of 220t/hr. For packaging and despatch the plant has four cement silos. Two of these have a capacity of 10,000t for bulk cement. The other two have a capacity of 5000t for bagged cement. The plant also uses a 0.15Mm³ rainwater reservoir to store water to cool machinery.

Uzbekistan: Russia’s Eurocement has ordered three mills from Germany’s Gebr. Pfeiffer for its Akhangarancement plant upgrade in Uzbekistan. The package includes an MVR 5000 R-4 for raw material grinding and two MVR 5000 C-4 for cement grinding. The MVR 5000 R-4, features a total drive power of 2500kW, will grind 500t/hr of cement raw material to a fineness of 12% R 90µm. The cement mills, each with an installed drive power of 4000kW, are designed to grind 200t/hr of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) at 3200 Blaine. No value for the order has been disclosed.

Germany: Fuchs Petrolub has officially opened an expansion to its plant in Kaiserslautern. A new automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) warehouse, two production halls and new office space for a total of Euro16m have been built on the premises of Fuchs Lubritech. The location, which mainly produces lubricants for special applications, now covers a total of 96,000m².

"The growth of the special application division and the concentration of diverse activities at this location made an expansion necessary. The extension is part of our global growth initiative, which is focused on capacity increase in line with advanced technology," said Stefan Fuchs, Chairman of the Board of Fuchs Petrolub.

India: The Cement Corporation of India has started the sale of its non-operating Nayagaon plant in Madhya Pradesh. Prospective bidders are invited to submit an expression of interest by mid-April 2019, according to the Press Trust of India. The Nayagaon plant was originally shut in 1997 but its mining lease remains valid for two quarries until early 2024.

The state-owned cement producer operates plants at Rajban in Himachal Pradesh, Bokajan in Assam and Tandur in Telangana. It has closed down integrated plants at Mandhar in Chhattisgarh, Kurkunta in Karnataka, Akaltara in Chhattisgarh, Charkhi and Dadri in Haryana, Adilabad in Telangana and Nayagaon in Madhya Pradesh. It has also closed grinding plants at Delhi and Bhatinda in Punjab. The company is planning to sell its non-operating plants first before divesting the operational units.

Cementos Molins’ financial results took a tumble this week, in part due to the poorly performing Argentinian economy. A decrease in sales in Mexico was also to blame but rampant inflation in Argentina caused the Spanish cement producer problems.

Cementos Molins owns a 51% stake in Cementos Avellaneda, with Brazil’s Votorantim Cimentos owning the remainder. Molins took pains in its financial report to point out that the aggregate rate of inflation had been 109% in mid-2018. Accordingly, its income and earnings in 2018 would have been much better if the economy had been in a better state. As it was, its income fell by 24% year-on-year to Euro134m and its earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) dropped by 30% to Euro30.3m. Adjusted for negative inflationary effects these should have risen by 43% and 31% in 2018.

Graph 1: Construction activity in Argentina (year-on-year growth, %). Source: El Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de la República Argentina (INDEC).

Graph 2: Monthly changes in cement despatches in Argentina (year-on-year growth, %). Source: Asociación de Fabricantes de Cemento Portland (AFCP).

The other major local producers, Loma Negra and LafargeHolcim Argentina, are owned by Brazil’s InterCement and Switzerland’s LafargeHolcim respectively. Both companies are due to present their financial results later this week but the signs were not looking good earlier in the financial year. In its third quarter results Loma Negra said that the general economy was dragging on cement demand. Construction activity data from El Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de la República Argentina (INDEC) showed that growth nosedived in mid-2018. This corresponds roughly with falling year-on-year cement despatches. Loma Negra noted that the depreciation of the Argentine Peso was hitting its bottom line and that its cement sales volumes dropped by 6.2% to 1.61Mt in the third quarter of 2018 from 1.72Mt in the same period in 2017. Despite this, its net revenue grew by 42.3% in the nine months to the end of September 2018.

Understandably, much of the talk in Loma Negra’s third quarter earnings call was about the effects of local currency depreciation with questions about how the expenditure for its L’Amalí plant expansion project was split between different currencies or how fuel costs were being affected. More revealing though was information about Loma Negra’s plans to reduce production capacity as national demand falls. Chief executive officer (CEO) Sergio Faifman said that the production cost at L’Amalí would be US$15/t less than the national average and that its Olavarría and Barker integrated plants would be first in line for production cuts given their closeness to L’Amalí.

Holcim Argentina reported ‘significant’ growth until May 2018 in its third quarter report. From here its sales fell and it expected zero growth for the year as a whole. It blamed this on the state of the general economy, the lower attractiveness of mortgages in the residential sector and problems with infrastructure project financing. Its sales volumes of cement rose by 6.4% year-on-year to 2.54Mt in the first nine months of 2018 from 2.39Mt in the same period in 2017. Holcim Argentina also has an upgrade project underway, at its Malagueño cement plant near Córdoba. Once completed by the end of 2019, the project is expected to increase the unit’s production capacity by 0.73Mt to over 3Mt/yr.

The problems facing the Argentine cement producers are clearly due to the poor general economy. The government took a US$56bn loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in mid-2018 to shore up the situation. Since then the Argentinean Peso seems to have stabilised against the US Dollar and inflation has settled. At this point the question is whether this is the bottom of the economic trough. The other thing to note is that Argentina has faced economic problems at the same time as Turkey. Although Turkey has a much bigger cement industry, both countries are prominent cement producers in their regions.

The sad thing though is that the local cement market was facing shortages in late 2017, producers were investing in new production capacity and Loma Negra launched an initial public offering (IPO). All of this growth in the cement industry has been jeopardised by the general economy. Let’s hope it rebounds soon.