Displaying items by tag: Rail

US: Mississippi Lime has declared a force majeure event due to flooding by the Mississippi River caused by ‘significant’ precipitation in the central US. The flooding has impacted the lime producer’s distribution and supply capabilities. This is expected to cause delays in supplying products to customers and will incur additional costs that it will pass through as a surcharge. The company added that, despite this, the flooding has not affected production.

Flooding on the Mississippi River forced the closure of Mississippi Lime’s barge loading facilities in early May 2019 and an alternate barge loading facility later in the month. The company does not anticipate re-opening its facility until the flood waters recede to a safe level, possibly in late June 2019. In the meantime the closure of flood gates near the company’s Ste Genevieve, Missouri unit has forced the company to use an alternate rail route with reduced shipment capacity, additional transit time and higher cost for both inbound and outbound shipments. Mississippi Lime anticipates resuming rail shipments in late June 2019, depending on weather conditions.

India: Penna Cement has signed a five years freight tariff deal with South Central Railway (SCR). As part of the agreement the rate will remain fixed for one year, according to the New Indian Express newspaper. The contract also offers incentives including discounts if the freight volume exceeds the previous year’s amount. Penna Cement is the eighth company to sign such an agreement with the SCR.

Afghanistan/Uzbekistan: Uzbekistan’s Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Complex (AMMC) has started exporting cement to Afghanistan. A trial consignment of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) was despatched from the company’s new 1.5Mt/yr Sherabad cement plant in Surkhandarya, according to the Trend News Agency. It intends to export 0.5Mt/yr to Afghanistan. As part of a contract signed with the Hamid Company just under 1000t of cement has been sent by train to Mazar-i-Sharif.

UK: Hanson has completed a Euro1.25m upgrade to its Bellshill cement terminal in Glasgow, converting it into a dual product storage and distribution site. Improvements included new pipework and a new silo monitoring system. The site has three silos: two for cement powder, transported by rail from the company’s Ribblesdale cement plant in Lancashire, and one for the storage and distribution of ground granulated blastfurnace slag (GGBS), produced at the company’s Teesport site in Middlesbrough. The upgrade took 17 months to complete. Cement has been transported by rail to the Bellshill terminal since 2007.

Switzerland: Deliveries of cement rose slightly to 4.29Mt in 2018 from 4.27Mt in 2017. CemSuisse, the local cement association, said that it was expecting lower imports in 2018 due to reduced cement demand. Over half of the deliveries were made by rail at 51.5% but the share of road deliveries increased. Over 70% of local cement production was delivered to ready-mix concrete plants and around a further 20% was sent to in-situ concrete plants at major construction projects.

Colombia: Cementos Argos and Ibines Ferreo have been helping the National Agency for Infrastructure run freight train tests on the 257km railway line between Bogota and Belencito. To show that the refurbished line can handle different loads, a train travelled from Cementos Argos' Sogamoso plant in the department of Boyaca to Bogota, according to the Portafolio newspaper. It carried 204t of cement at an estimated speed of 20km/hr.

ANI has invested US$73.3m in the refurbishment of rail infrastructure between Bogota and the Boyaca department. Sections of track repaired by ANI between Bogota and Boyaca include La Caro-Zipaquira, Bogota-Facatativa and Bogota-Belencito. The line stopped operating due to damage caused by winter storms in 2010 and 2011.

Nepal: Cement producers in the Parsa-Bara industrial corridor have started importing clinker from the Narayanpur railway station in Bihar. The change in the supply chain has followed disruption in clinker imports via the Raxaul- Birgunj border crossing on environmental grounds, according to the Kathmandu Post newspaper. The longer route has raised production costs due to higher transport fees.

Kenyan cement producers kicked off this week about Chinese cement imports for the Standard Gauge Railway Project in Kenya. Local producers, including ARM Cement and Lafarge, have asked the Kenya Railways Corporation to explain why the Chinese-backed project is importing cement. Project builders the China Rail & Bridge Corporation (CRBC) has imported 7000t of cement so far in 2015 according to Kenya Ports Authority data.

Project completion is planned for 2017 with a requirement of 1Mt of cement. If CRBC carried on this rate then, roughly, the project might only use 42,000t of imported cement if the import rate holds. This is less than 5% of the estimated requirement. However, cement imports increases into Kenya have stayed steady since 2012. Imports rose by 2000t from 2013 to 2014. CRBC's imports will stick out significantly in 2015.

Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) data places Kenyan cement production at 5.8Mt in 2014, an increase of 16.3% from 5.1Mt in 2013. Production growth has been steadily building since the late 1990s with, more recently, a dip in the rate of growth in 2011 that has been 'corrected' as the growth has returned. Consumption has risen by 21.8% year-on-year to 5.2Mt in 2014 with imports also rising and exports dropping.

Imports for the railway project are duty free as ARM Cement Chief Executive Officer Pradeep Paunrana helpfully explained to Bloomberg. Producers have also recently upgraded their plants to specifically supply 52.5 grade cement to the project. Given this, it is unsurprising that local Kenyan producers, including ARM Cement and Lafarge, are complaining about this situation, especially given the increasingly pugnacious African response to foreign imports led by Dangote and companies in South Africa. Both ARM and Lafarge hold integrated plants and grinding plants in Nairobi and Mombasa. This is the route of the new railway line.

The backdrop to this is that the Chinese cement industry is struggling at home as it adjusts to lower construction rates and reduced cement production growth. Profits made by the Chinese cement industry fell by 67.6% year-on-year to US$521m for the first quarter of 2015, according to National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) statistics. At the same time the Shanghai Composite, China's principal stock market, has seen the value of its shares fall by 30% since June.

Although it is unclear where the cement imports in this particular row are coming from, informal or formal business links between large state controlled corporations such as a China's major cement producers will always be questioned by competitors outside of China for both genuine issues of competitiveness and simple attempts to claw more profit. If the Chinese cement producers are sufficiently spooked or they really start to lose money then what is to stop it asking a sister company building a large infrastructure project abroad to offer it some help? Or it might consider asking the Chinese bank providing 90% of the financing towards the US$3.8bn infrastructure project to force the Kenyan government to offer more concessions to foreign firms. Meanwhile one counter argument goes that Kenya has a growing construction market with a giant infrastructure project that may unlock the region's long-simmering low cement consumption per capita boom. The Kenyan government may face some difficult decisions ahead.

The prospects for the East African cement industry have risen this week following the formal agreement to build a new railway line linking the port city of Mombasa and Nairobi in Kenya. The US$3.8bn project will replace the existing 100 year old narrow gauge track with work scheduled to start in October 2014 and a completion date in 2018. The second phase of the project is then intended to extend the line to neighbouring inland countries including Uganda, South Sudan and Rwanda among others.

The bottom line here from Reuters' reporting is that the new line will cut freight costs by more than half to US$0.08/t per km from US$0.20/t per km. Anybody considering sending freight along the 610km line could see their costs drop from US$122/t to US$49/t. With the average cement price in Kenya reported at US$75/t at the start of 2014, these kind of prices seem unlikely to throw the market to the mercy of overseas imports. Moving one tonne of cement along the full length of the line would cost more than half of the selling price. Yet the effect on input costs or transport over smaller distances may have an effect, especially if the inland extension actually gets built.

Kenya has four integrated cement plants with a production capacity of 3.4Mt/yr. Of these three - ARM Cement, Bamburi Cement (Lafarge) and Mombasa Cements are on the coast – and only one plant, the East African Portland Cement Company, is based inland in Nairobi. In addition National Cement and Savannah Cement both run clinker grinding plants near Nairobi.

A number of plants are being built. Most recently, Savannah Cement announced plans in April 2014 to build a clinker production plant. The East Africa Portland Cement Company plans to build a plant in Kajiado for operation by 2016. Nigeria's Dangote Cement has a 1.5Mt/yr cement plant planned to start operation in 2016 in Kitui, between Nairobi and the coast with ARM seeking funding to build a 2.5Mt/yr cement plant in the same region. Cemtech, a company owned by India's Sanghi Group, has plans to build a plant in West Pokot County in western Kenya but the project has been delayed due to issues with land acquisition.

Despite all this development activity Kenyan Bureau of Statistics figures suggest that more cement is being produced in the country than is officially being consumed. In 2013, 4.8Mt of cement was produced but only 3.94Mt was consumed. Yet both production and consumption have more than doubled since 2004 from 1.87Mt and 1.27Mt respectively. With the Kenyan construction sector averaging a growth rate of 6.45%/yr between 2004 and 2012, it looks likely that consumption will continue to rise and all these new cement plants are poised to benefit form this.

The old Ugandan railway, which the new railway seeks to replace, started construction in 1896 and was backed by the British government. It was nicknamed the 'Lunatic Line' given the harsh terrain and the high worker fatalities. The perils facing the project were capped by a pair of man-eating lions who attacked workers as depicted in the book 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo' and eventually made into a film called 'The Ghost and the Darkness' starring Michael Douglass. Then as today the potential benefits of connecting the African coast to the interior were seen as high.