Displaying items by tag: Slag

India: Bokaro Steel Plant has won granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) supply contracts with ACC and UltraTech Cement. Under the contracts, Bokaro Steel Plant expects to supply 1.3Mt of GBFS from its facilities in Jharkhand for use in cement production in the state. The Pioneer newspaper has reported that the contracts will run until August 2026.

Cement producers in Bangladesh received a surprise at the start of June 2023 when the government budget proposed increasing the duty on imported clinker. The Bangladesh Cement Manufacturers Association (BCMA) reacted this week by calling for the duty on clinker to be reduced, while also calling for the same for a non-adjustable advance income tax (AIT) applied to associated imports and sales.

During a press conference, reported upon by the Financial Express newspaper and other media, BCMA president Alamgir Kabir said that the customs duty on key raw materials for the sector had previously been around 5% of the import value. However, he argued that the new suggested increased tariff was “disproportionate” because it placed the burden at 12 - 13%. He urged the government to treat the cement sector as a "priority sector" given that it was facing higher prices generally due to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the energy shocks from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and negative currency exchange effects.

The BCMA’s latest lobbying call may sound familiar because it follows a similar battle against import charges from late 2022. A supplementary duty was introduced in November 2022 when the National Board of Revenue (NBR) changed the way limestone was coded in response to a significant increase in imports from 2020. At the time, the price of limestone imports reportedly nearly doubled. The BCMA may have won this battle because in March 2023 the NBR withdrew its supplementary duty. It did require that importers submit to further scrutiny including an updated Import Registration Certificate and various tax related requirements.

The timing of the NBR’s decision to relax the limestone duty is telling given that the previous month or so six of the country’s seven publicly listed cement producers reported either falling profits or losses for the second half of 2022 or the year as a whole. Only LafargeHolcim Bangladesh bucked the trend with an increase year-on-year in its annual profit after tax in 2022, although it attributed this to 95% volume growth in its aggregates business.

As discussed previously a characteristic of the cement sector in Bangladesh is that the country has no domestic limestone reserves. It all has to be imported. Arusha Ahmed Khan, Shun Shing Group presented a summary of the national industry at the Global Slag Conference that took place in early June 2023 in Düsseldorf. The country has two integrated cement plants and 36 grinding mills operated by 31 companies with a total capacity of 84Mt/yr. At present around 14Mt/yr of new cement grinding production capacity is planned by UK Bangla Cement, MI Cement, Confidence Cement and Dubai Bangla with commissioning dates expected from mid-2023 to mid-2025. Khan revealed that the government switched from British to European standards in the early 2000s leading to a high level (95%) of blended cements on the market. Use of slag cements has grown as more producers commission vertical roller mills and more uptake of slag and other blended cements using secondary cementitious materials (SCM) is expected in the future.

A key vulnerability for a grinding-heavy cement sector, like the one in Bangladesh, is any burden on imports such as logistic costs, currency exchange effects and government tariffs. Sure enough each of these examples has been reported locally. The government says that its proposed higher import tariff on clinker is the first such change in a decade. Cement producers have reacted, predictably, in a negative manner. Whether the authorities go ahead with the planned increase and how well the cement sector could absorb it remains to be seen. There may never be a good time for a tax rise but the BCMA has been able to present the current period as being especially bad.

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Ireland: Ecocem has appointed Jaouad Nadah as its Innovation Project Manager. He will be responsible for the coordination of the company’s ACT technology as it scales up development. This will include supporting a range of partnerships under development by Ecocem across Europe and beyond. Nadah previously worked for CRH-subsidiary Eqiom and Holcim, with a focus on innovation in the low carbon cement market. Ecocem launched ACT in late 2022. It says it is an alternative materials-based cement ingredient capable of reducing the CO₂ emissions of cement production by up to 70%.

Heidelberg Materials North America held an official opening ceremony this week for its upgraded slag cement plant and terminal at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The US$24m project added a new roller press to the unit to increase its production capacity. In a statement Chris Ward, the president and chief executive officer of the company, said that it had made the investment to meet sustainability and resilient construction goals. Industrial Accessories Company (IAC) said in mid-2021 that it had been named as the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor for the project. It planned to install a hydraulic roller press supplied by FLSmidth. IAC also said it was providing instrumentation equipment, hoppers, bins, belt conveyors, bucket elevators and dust collectors amongst other kit and services.

Other recent US slag cement-related news stories have concerned terminals. In late August 2022 Royal White Cement said it had leased a site on the Houston Ship Channel in Houston, Texas to handle and store approximately 100,000t of multiple cementitous products such as slag, ordinary Portland cement and white Cement. In May 2022 Titan America announced plans to spend US$37m on an upgrade to its Norfolk terminal in Chesapeake, Virginia. The major improvement was to add a 70,000t storage dome, with enlarged truck and railway capacity, to allow the site to import and distribute raw materials such as fly ash, slag and aggregates. Completion on this one was scheduled for some point in 2023. Titan added that the project was similar to the addition of a 70,000t dome under construction at the time at Titan's import terminal in Tampa, Florida.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that domestic sales of iron and steel (ferrous) slags in the US amounted to 15Mt in 2022. Sales were around 20Mt in the 2000s but this fell to current levels in the 2010s as blast furnaces closed. In 2022 the USGS noted that, “domestic ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) remained in limited supply because granulation cooling was known to be available at only two active US blast furnaces while, elsewhere, only one domestic plant produced pelletised slag in limited supply.” It added that the grinding of granulated blast furnace slag was only being carried out domestically by cement companies. Imports of slag were 2Mt in 2022. This is a decline from a peak of 2.6Mt in 2018 but higher than the period 2000 – 2015. The price of slag, meanwhile, hit a high of US$53/t in 2022. This is the highest price recorded by the USGS since at least 2000. It is double that of 2017.

Charles Zeynel of ZAG International noted in the June 2023 issue of Global Cement Magazine that cement producers in Florida, California, Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas are far from steel mills, so they import granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) and other secondary cementitious materials (SCM). This certainly fits with Heidelberg Materials’ plan to upgrade its slag cement plant and terminal at Cape Canaveral. Also on the US market, Zeynel added that due to rising global demand for SCMs more of the available share of GBFS was being purchased by ‘richer’ markets such as Europe, North America and Australia. He continued that GBFS and GGBFS producers had also started increasing the price of their wares internationally. This too is apparent in the prices published by the USGS.

One final story with links to slag to note this week concerns the launch of the Alliance for Low-Carbon Cement & Concrete (ALCC) in Europe. The group brings together companies producing products or services intended to decarbonise the cement and concrete sectors. Two of the members – Ecocem and Hoffman Green Cement Technologies – are Europe-based slag cement producers. Two other members – Fortera and TerraCO₂ – are companies based in North America that are marketing and selling low-carbon SCMs.

Various start-up companies have been emerging on a regular basis in both North America and Europe with the aim of decarbonising cement and concrete in various different ways. The formation of the ALCC can be seen as part of this trend as the more successful non-traditional cement-concrete-aggregate companies establish themselves. One point that cement producers in North America are likely to be well aware of is that concrete is becoming less linked to clinker as the cost of carbon mounts and the clinker factor of cement lowers. Slag supplies may be finite but Heidelberg Materials North America’s latest investment in Florida is further acceptance that one doesn’t just need clinker to make concrete.

Read Charles Zeynel’s interview on SCM Trends in 2023 in the June 2023 issue of Global Cement Magazine

The 15th Global Slag Conference, Exhibition & Awards take place on 6 - 7 June 2023 in Düsseldorf, Germany

UK: Riku Kytömäki, the chief executive officer of Betolar, has called for a global performance-based standard to replace the current building requirements that restrict the use of new low-carbon materials to replace cement in concrete production. He made the comments at the London Concrete Expo. Kytömäki argued that current standards state that concrete manufacturers must use a certain percentage of cement to strengthen the finished product. Betolar’s product Geoprime is an additive designed for use in cement-free concrete production with ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS). However, “ageing” standards rule out the use of these kinds of products such as this despite their sustainability advantages.

Kytömäki said “It is time for global concrete industry to step up their sustainability efforts. New material innovation is available. It is cost-effective and helps to meet stricter durability requirements. However, the current regulations across the markets are restricting the use of circular materials allowed in concrete buildings.” He added that his company’s product Geoprime, “does not require large investments, but there is regulation to be developed quickly so that new solutions and materials can be used."

Betolar says it has analysed over 200 side-streams other than slag and fly ash, providing flexibility to process locally available side-streams. It added that there are also significant CO₂ savings to be found in logistics when manufacturing processes take place near the source of the industrial side-streams.

Cement 2 Zero (C2Z) has officially launched in the UK this week. The project is an industrial scale pilot of the Cambridge Electric Cement (CEC) process. The Materials Processing Institute will lead on this stage with two-year funding of around Euro7m provided by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Partners include the University of Cambridge, Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Brewster Brothers, Celsa Group, Day Aggregates and Tarmac.

CEC’s method uses recycled concrete paste in place of lime-flux in steel recycling. Slag is formed as the steel melts and this is then used in place of clinker to make more cement. This way of making cement cuts out the decarbonisation of limestone step from conventional clinker production. If renewably-sourced electricity is used to power the heating and grinding parts of manufacture, then cement production in this way could potentially cut out most of its CO₂ emissions. The first phase of trial melts by C2Z will be conducted by the Materials Processing Institute using a 250kg induction furnace and this will be scaled up to 6t in an electric arc furnace (EAF). Later, industrial scale melts will be tested in Celsa Steel's EAF in Cardiff, Wales.

CEC is taking a similar approach to HeidelbergCement with its research into using recycled concrete paste. However, HeidelbergCement says it is using the paste to help capture CO₂ in an enforced carbonation step it is testing at cement plants. It too though wants to create a secondary cementitious material (SCM) afterwards. There are also links here to construction and demolition waste and electric cement kilns as covered by Global Cement Weekly previously. The latter is different with regards to what CEC is doing because it is recycling concrete waste to produce an SCM (slag) rather than using an electrically powered kiln to make clinker from limestone. Coolbrook, VTT and the like have had to build electric kilns effectively from scratch or adapt technology from elsewhere for their approaches whilst CEC appears to be about to use existing EAFs in its industrial scale pilot.

Figure 1: Projection of how the Cambridge Electric Cement production process could be used at scale in the UK. Source: UK FIRES. Click to view larger version.

CEC’s forecast of how its process could be used at scale in the UK can be seen above in Figure 1. If the majority of the country’s steel scrap was recycled in this fashion each year then 2.4Mt/yr of CEC cement could be produced. This would represent a quarter of the c10Mt of cement sales reported by the MPA in 2021. Assuming the EAFs were powered by renewables then this could reduce the cement sector’s CO₂ emissions significantly. Although it would still leave the industry looking for other decarbonisation routes for the other three-quarters of cement demand.

C2Z and CEC offer a novel spin on cement production by recycling concrete waste, using an electrical heating step and dodging the process emissions associated with normal ordinary Portland cement (OPC) clinker production. If it did progress to a commercial stage then it would see a continued relationship between steel and cement producers. Currently this is mainly centered around iron and steel slag usage as a SCM. One point of interest here would be how much higher levels of steel recycling and a process like CEC being used regularly would affect existing slag usage as an SCM. It doesn’t look like CEC could solve the cement sector’s CO₂ emission problem all on its own but it could certainly make a difference if it progressed to a commercial stage. As ever with cement sector decarbonisation there appear to be a range of options available to producers.

UK: Cambridge Electric Cement (CEC) has launched the two-year trial of its Cement 2 Zero project, aimed at scaling up production of its net zero-CO₂, demolition waste-based alternative cement. It aims to produce 20t of the material for use in a low-impact construction project. CEC’s method, developed at the University of Cambridge, is based on the conversion of demolition waste into a slag-forming material within a steel furnace.

Developer Julian Allwood said “By combining steel and cement recycling in a single process powered by renewable electricity, we could supplement the global supply of the basic construction materials to support the infrastructure of a zero emissions world and to enable economic development where it is most needed.”

Finland: Geoprime producer Betolar has named Riku Kytömäki as its new president and CEO. Riku's professional background is in materials technology, having served as president and CEO of Exel Composites and held senior positions in Switzerland-based ABB. Kytömäki holds board positions in several international companies and organisations, including polymers producer Teknikum Group. He has management experience in Asian markets where Betolar has expanded during the past few years.

Betolar said "Riku will lead Betolar through its next growth phase as its Geoprime solution is entering active production. Geoprime is a next-generation, low-carbon solution and sustainable alternative to cement: it delivers 80% fewer emissions and 100% cement-free building materials with the same performance as traditional concrete."

Austria: Rail logistics company ÖBB Rail Cargo Group (RCG) says that its haulage of 80,000t/yr of granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) and clinker to and from w&p Zement's Wietersdorf cement plant in Carinthia by rail has removed 3200 trucks/yr from the road since its start in 2019. RCG's trains deliver the plant's clinker to the Peggau-Deutschfeistritz railway station in Styria, and return to the plant laden with GBFS from steel producer Voestalpine's nearby Leoben refinery.

RCG said that w&p Zement is currently working to increase its operations' reliance on rail, adding "Further innovative transport solutions are already being worked on."

US: Bulk material handling equipment supplier MDG America says that it delivered four chain bucket elevators for Drake Cement's upgrade of its Paulden cement plant in Arizona. Drake Cement installed a new vertical mill grinding plant for cement, granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) and raw materials grinding at the 0.7Mt/yr integrated plant. The supplier says that two of the elevators will work in a pair, conveying material from a feeder belt, while a third will convey it to the new mill. The fourth elevator will then collect the material for further grinding and metal discharge.

Drake cement secured approval to mine pozzolan for use in the Paulden's plants cement production at Bill Williams Mountain earlier in October 2022. As part of minimising the future mine's impacts, Drake Cement has offered to help the US Forestry Service to thin local woodland as part of local anti-fire management efforts.