Displaying items by tag: Slag cement

France: ArcelorMittal plans to increase its stake in Ecocem France to 49% from 30% by the end of May 2018. The transaction is subject to the approval of the Irish Competition Authority. The French subsidiary of Ireland’s Ecocem was set up in 2007 by ArcelorMittal and Ecocem Materials.

Ecocem produces slag cement from ground granulated blast furnace slag. Ecocem France operates a 0.7Mt/yr grinding plant at Fos-sur-Mer near to an ArcelorMittal plant. It plans to open a second 0.7Mt/yr grinding plant at Dunkirk in May 2018. The new plant is intended to target western and northern France as well as export markets in the UK and Belgium.

Algeria: Work on the construction of low CO₂ cement plant will commence shortly in Bellara, El Milia, according to the local Minister of Environment. The plant, a project by an Algerian-Emirati-Indian partnership, will produce cement using slag and fly ash from the nearby Bellara power station and steel complex, as well as its own clinker. It will have a capacity of 2Mt/yr for the local and export market. It will generate 143 direct jobs when fully operational.

Nepal: Arghakhachi Cement and Jagdamba Cement are planning to build new cement plants. Arghakhachi Cement is spending US$48m on building a new integrated plant, according to the Kathmandu Post newspaper. The new plant will be launched by mid-2018. The company already operates an integrated cement plant at Birpur in Kapilvastu.

Jagdamba Cement is planning to build a 1500t/day cement plant in eastern Bhairahawa. The new unit will create 400 jobs. The cement producer operates two cement-grinding plants at Bhairahawa and Birgunj. The company produces Ordinary Portland Cement, Pozzolana Portland Cement and Pozzolana Slag Cement products.

India: Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, has inaugurated JSW Cement’s plant at Salboni. The US$125m grinding plant has a production capacity of 2.4Mt/yr, according to the Press Trust of India. It started commercial production at the site in July 2017 with plans to manufacture Portland Slag Cement. The cement producer is already preparing upgrades at the unit including a US$15.6m captive power plant with a capacity of 18MW and a US$47m production capacity increase of 1.2Mt/yr.

Putting two speakers from the European Commission front and centre at the start of this year’s European Slag Association Conference (EuroSlag) in Metz, France was always going to cause a ruck. Once Coal and Steel Research Unit head Hervé Martin and steel sector policy officer Gabriele Morgante said their pieces and the panel opened up then the verbal punches started flying. Okay, this may be slightly exaggerated, but after a bunch of policy-heavy presentations, suddenly the situation became crystal clear. Was the agricultural use of ferrous slag going to be allowed to continue? What would be the classification of the slag? And so on. One Russian delegate commented afterwards, “I thought we had environmental problems in Russia.”

Jérémie Domas, Centre Technique et de Promotion des Laitiers Sidérurgiques (CTPL) explained in a later presentation that the heart of the current debate goes back to the European Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC). This legislation created an ambiguity over the status of slag between classifying it, as a waste or as a by-product, that the European industry has been battling over ever since. A multi-coloured map in Aurelio Braconi of the European Steel Association’s (Eurofer) presentation depicted the disarray this has caused with the varied legal statuses of slag across Europe. To add to this, Braconi’s home country of Italy, for example, is split into designating slag as both a product and a waste. His response was to say that the ‘human factor’ was important back home for utilising slag. The European Union (EU) is now working on its Circular Economy Package, which includes revised legislative proposals on waste, and it has been consulting on various issues throughout the year. It is this process is that been making slag producers twitchy.

Other delegates on the first session’s panel provided a bit more context, with Thomas Reiche of the German Technical Association for Ferrous Slag (FEHS) saying that the waste legislation didn’t need to be changed but that public procurement laws did. Eric Seitz of the French Association of the Users of industrial By-products (AFOCO) added that slag products had been sold for decades without any problems. However, he definitely wanted ‘strong’ support from the EU on the issue.

Moving on, Craig Heidrich of the Australasian (Iron & Steel) Slag Association (ASA) provided some interesting figures in his presentation on worldwide slag production that differ from the data often reported by trading companies. Heidrich reckoned that 567Mt of slag was produced in 2015 with a breakdown of 347Mt blast furnace (BF) slag and 220Mt steel slag.

Andreas Ehrenberg of the FEHS presented research on converting electric arc furnace (EAF) slag into a hydraulic material that could be used in cement or concrete production. Given that, using Heidrich’s figures for example, about a third of ferrous slag production is steel slag often created in an EAF, the potential implications of this line of inquiry are important. Unfortunately, the main disadvantages of the original EAF slag analysed in Ehrenberg’s work compared to BF slag are the lower CaO and SiO₂ contents and the higher MgO and Fe oxide contents. Laboratory-scale tests confirmed in principle the feasibility of forming clinker or ground blast furnace slag-like materials based on EAF slag. But the reduction and treatment steps in the process require a lot of effort and the economical value of the recovered metal is low. Taking the research further will require much more work on the semi-technical scale.

The other paper with particular relevance to the cement industry was Chris Poling of SCB International unveiling his company’s ground blast furnace slag (GBFS) micro-grinding mill, the Nutek Mill 2. The new mill is intended to allow slag grinding to take place in a much wider range of locations, along similar lines to the modular clinker grinding mills made by Cemengal or Gebr. Pfeiffer’s Ready2Grind line. The pilot project is being installed now in New York State, US. The mill has a GBFS capacity of 10 - 12t/hr with a target of 40 – 45kWh/t when fully optimised. Further units at the same location are planned for early 2018 with approval sought from the New York State Department of Transportation.

The 10th European Slag Conference is expected to take place in 2019. With more clarity expected from the EU on its Circular Economy Package there will be much to discuss.

Brunei Darussalam: Butra HeidelbergCement has launched 52.5 Brunei Cement, a new slag cement in its product range. German ambassador Peter Wolff and Legislative Council member YB Ong Tiong Oh attended the launch event.

Indonesia: Krakatau Semen Indonesia (KSI), a joint venture between Krakatau Steel and Semen Indonesia, has launched a slag grinding plant in Cilegon, Banten. The 0.69Mt/yr ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) plant had an investment of US$31m, according to the Jakarta Post newspaper. Construction at the site started in 2014. Both the companies running the venture are state owned and they own an equal share each in the plant.

Further shifts in the South Korean cement industry this week as Ssangyong Cement purchased Daehan Cement. Private equity firm Hahn & Company owns both producers so this looked like a realignment exercise. Yet it follows a corporate version of pass-the-parcel within the local cement industry. Hyundai Cement was acquired by Hanil Cement in the first half of 2017, Halla Cement was bought by investment firms from LafargeHolcim in mid-2016 and Tongyang Cement was bought by Sampyo Group in 2015.

Ssangyong Cement’s purchase is seen in the local media as an attempt to reaffirm its market dominance. Before the Hyundai Cement auction, Ssangyong Cement was the market leader with a cement production capacity of 15Mt/yr and a market share of around 20%. Hanil Cement’s on-going purchase of Hyundai Cement will see it increase its production capacity from 7Mt/yr to over 15Mt/yr. Ssangyong Cement’s transaction for Daehan Cement puts it back in the lead again.

The local industry is notable for the high ratio of cement grinding plants to integrated plants. The Korean Cement Association (KCA) reported that the country had 12 integrated plants to 23 grinding plants in 2015. This compares to other developed countries in relatively remote places such as Australia and Chile that also have high numbers of grinding plants. South Korea doesn’t import that much clinker though. One difference is its prominent steel industry that has hovered around 70Mt/yr since 2014 and which puts it in the top ten of world producers. Subsequently, as POSCO’s Sunghee Han explained at the Global Slag Conference 2016, 13.9Mt of granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) was produced in 2015 and the majority of this ended up being used as supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) either to grind cement or to make concrete. The size of this slag market underlines the value of the Daehan Cement sale, as it is a major slag cement producer.

Other notable point about the local cement industry includes the presence of a few extremely large multi-kiln plants with production capacities in excess of 7Mt/yr. The country also has a relative scarcity of limestone. South Korea is the fifth biggest importer of limestone in the world at US$34m. It brings limestone in principally from the UAE, Japan, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Notably it also has one of the world’s longest single conveyors, with a length of 12.8km, connecting a quarry to Ssangyong Cement’s Donghae plant.

Graph 1: Cement production and consumption in South Korea, 2010 – 2015. Source: Korean Cement Association.

Unlike the European cement-producing nations that this column has covered in recent weeks, fundamental market structural changes do not appear to be driving the merger and acquisition activity in South Korea. As Graph 1 shows, production and consumption fell from 2010 onwards but has started to pick up since 2013. Instead, a general slowing of the economy from 2010 and a relaxation of the rules triggered merger and acquisition activity. Unsurprisingly then, perhaps, given the potential opportunities for market manipulation, that the Fair Trade Commission fined six of the seven major producers a total of US$168m in early 2016 for alleged price fixing. With the private equity firms widely expected to exit the market after a relative short time, the cement industry looks set to remain volatile for the next few years. Doubtless the market regulators will be watching very carefully indeed to see how it all plays out.

South Korea: Ssangyong Cement has purchased a 100% stake in Daehan Cement for US$232.8m. Ssangyong Cement has signed an agreement with Hahn & Company to buy the stake from the private equity firm, according to the Maeil Business Newspaper. Daehan Cement is the country’s largest slag cement producer. Ssangyong Cement’s purchase is expected to preserve the cement producer’s market lead against Hanil Cement which bought Hyundai Cement earlier in 2017.

UK: Ecocem Ireland has officially opened its import terminal at Sheerness. The company’s second terminal in the UK is set to supply the construction market in the southeast and London. The unit cost is Euro2.9m to build and it will be able to supply the market with 250,000t/yr of the company’s slag cement products.

It follows the opening of Ecocem’s terminal at Runcorn in early 2016 and it joins facilities in the Ireland, the Netherlands and France.

“Our second investment into the UK in a state of the art import facility demonstrates to the market the need for the low carbon cement alternative and the growing demand from the UK construction industry. We have already engaged in long term agreements with major concrete manufacturers in the UK and will continue to build momentum in the coming months,” said Micheál McKittrick, the managing director of Ecocem Ireland.