Displaying items by tag: Slag

India: Dalmia Bharat has blamed the general election for its slow cement sales volumes growth in its first quarter. Its sales volumes of cement increased slightly to 4.55Mt. Its revenue grew by 7% year-on-year to US$365m in the first fiscal quarter to 30 June 2019 from US$340m in the same period in 2018. Its earnings before interest, taxation, deprecation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 27% to US$95.7m from US$75.2m.

The cement producer also said that its power and fuel costs per tonne had been negatively affected by its Kalyanpur plant operating at low capacity utilisation levels, partly due to a lack of coal. However, it noted that its raw material costs had been ‘moderated’ due to falling slag prices.

France: Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies and Bouygues Construction have signed a 30-month initial technical and commercial collaboration agreement to develop and test concrete formulations using new cement made from Hoffmann’s H-EVA technology. Hoffmann Green Cement inaugurated its pilot plant at Bournezeau, Vendée in late 2018. The unit will manufacture cement products using flash-calcined metakaolin and blast-furnace slag. Bouygues Construction is a global construction company with a presence in over 60 countries.

Charah Solutions has been steadily building up its fly ash distribution business in recent years with an eye on the supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) market. This week it opened the third of its new series of SCM grinding plants, at Oxnard in California, US. The unit sticks out because it is focusing on grinding natural pozzolans. The plant will receive natural pozzolan by truck and rail and then use Charah’s patented grinding technology to produce pozzolan marketed under its MultiPozz brand. The previous plants in this series mentioned natural pozzolans but this is the first to promote it explicitly.

The change is potentially telling because global demand for granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) outstrips supply. Both performance benefits and environmental regulations are pushing this. It’s a similar situation for fly ash, also driven by trends to close coal-fired power stations in some countries. As Charles Zeynel of SCM trading firm ZAG International explained in the March 2019 issue of Global Cement Magazine, “...volcanic pozzolans are a potential SCM of the future. This is gaining traction, but it’s slow progress at the moment. This will be the answer for some users in some locations.”

The problem though is that natural pozzolans are down the list of preferred SCMs for their chemical properties after silica fume, GBFS and fly ash. The first is expensive but the latter two were traditionally cheap and easy to obtain if a cement or concrete producer had access to a source or a distribution network. Natural pozzolans are very much subject to variations in availability.

It’s no surprise then that Charah is promoting natural pozzolans in a Californian plant given that state’s environmental stance. It’s unclear where Charah is sourcing their pozzolan from but they are not the only company thinking about this in the US. Sunrise Resources, for example, is working on the environmental permits for a natural pozzolan mine near Tonopah in Nevada. As it described in its company presentation, California and Nevada are the most affected states in the fly ash supply crisis because they are, “...at the end of the line when it comes to rail deliveries from power stations in central and eastern USA.” It also estimated that California used 0.9Mt of pozzolan in its cement production of which about 90% is fly ash. The state produced 9.6Mt in 2015. Other companies are also mining and distributing natural pozzolans in the US as the website for the National Pozzolan Association (NPA) lists. Although, if this line-up is comprehensive, then the field is still fairly select. Most of these companies are based in the west of the country.

One last thing to consider is that various groups are tackling a potential future lack of SCMs for the cement industry by making their own pozzolanic materials through the use of calcined clay. These groups include the Swiss-government backed LC3 project and Cementir’s Futurecem products. Using clay should bypass the supply issues with natural pozzolans but the cost of calcining it requires at the very least an investment to get started.

As concrete enthusiasts often point out, a variant of pozzolanic concrete was used by the Romans to build many of their iconic structures, some of which survive to the present day. To give the last word to the NPA, “What is old is new again: natural pozzolan is back!” If environmental trends continue and steel and coal plants continue to be shut then it might just be right.

Spain: Endesa sold 0.3Mt of fly-ash from its Carboneras power plant in Almeria to cement companies in the UK and North America in 2018. The energy company also sold fly-ash to the nearby LafargeHolcim Carboneras cement plant, according to La Voz de Almería newspaper. The company has also sold 30,00t of slag and 60,000t of gypsum from its limestone plant.

Ukraine: Germany’s HeidelbergCement is selling its assets according to sources quoted by Interfax-Ukraine. It is reportedly selling to local investment group Concorde Capital and the deal will be completed during March and April 2019. The building materials local subsidiary, HeidelbergCement Ukraine, has not commented on story. The company operates integrated plants at Kryvyi Rih and Amvrosiyivka and a slag grinding plant at Kamyanske. Its loss rose by 14.4% year-on-year to around Euro14m in 2017.

France: Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies has inaugurated its pilot plant at Bournezeau, Vendée. The 50,000t/yr unit will manufacture cement products using metakaolin and blast-furnace slag, according to the L'Usine Nouvelle magazine. It says it will produce cement with reduced CO₂ emissions up to 250kg/t using a flash-calcined process down from 900kg/t in the normal clinker production process. The project had investment of Euro10m.

India: Jindal Steel & Power (JSP) plans to build a 2Mt/yr slag cement plant at Angul in Odisha. The US$68m unit will use ground granulated blast furnace slag sourced from a nearby steel plant operated by JSP, according to the Business Standard newspaper. A recent expansion at the steel plant to 6Mt/yr has allowed it to support a cement plant of this size. Land for the project has been acquired and the company hopes to obtain it from the state government by early 2019.

India: A joint-venture project involving the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) to build a new cement plant at Sundargarh in Odisha has stalled. Following support by local politicians for the plans in February 2017 no further action has been taken, according to the New Indian Express newspaper. SAIL originally made plans in 2006 to use blast furnace slag from the Rourkela Steel Plant and fly ash of NTPC-SAIL Power Company for the unit. It also intended pick up the lease for a limestone mine at Purunapani. However, it later ran into troubles securing state agreement to use the mine.

France: Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies’ pilot plant at Bournezeau, Vendée is set to start commercial production of low-carbon cement products in January 2019. Construction of the 50,000t/yr unit is due to be completed in October 2018 with its inauguration scheduled for late November 2018, according to Batiactu. The plant will employ 10 workers initially and this will rise to 15 – 20 as production ramps up.

The producer intends to make cement products using metakaolin and blast-furnace slag. If the pilot plant is a success it then intends to raise funds to build a 0.5Mt/yr plant.

Italy: Cemitaly has been allowed to use slag and ash in cement production at its Taranto plant following an investigation, according to the Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper. The former Cementir unit was investigated in 2017 as part of an illegal waste probe that examined whether the Taranto plant purchased ‘illegal’ by-products from Enel and the ILVA steel plant to produce cement.