Displaying items by tag: Sustainability

China: The government of Jiangsu province has awarded an Environmental Protection certificate to Imerys subsidiary Calderys’ Zhangjiang refractory plant. The company said that the certification results from years of hard to enhance environmental efforts beyond national requirements. One example of the work is dust-proof partitioning around all dust-emitting equipment.

Environment, health and safety supervisor Ricken Ren said, “In 2016, the plant improved the quality of its raw materials. With major work no longer required to lessen the water content of the materials, it was able to reduce the use of its dry kiln, which uses natural gases in its drying process, in turn greatly reducing the plant’s energy consumption. ” He added, “Keeping the plant’s environmental impact as low as possible is a never-ending job, and we cannot lose focus. We perform daily checks to ensure devices such as our dust collectors are working effectively, and we are always monitoring our emissions during operation according to national laws. Every department worked together on environmental protection performance. It is a great teamwork result.”

Chile: Melón has signed an electricity supply contract with Enel Generación. The contract covers the supply for its La Calera, Puerto Montt and Ventanas cement plants, and its San Bernardo aggregates quarry, until 2043, according to the La Tercera newspaper. All energy supplied under the contract will come from renewable sources. There is also the possibility of expanding the scope of the contract.

General Manager Iván Marinado said, “Our commitment to the sustainability of our operations is permanent. We have state-of-the-art technologies, we work together with our carriers in programmes to reduce logistical impact and energy efficiency, and we have a solid co-processing strategy for the use of alternative fuels (AF) and raw materials. Today we are happy to take a new step and start the use of renewable energies, as a concrete and effective example of our concern to contribute to the environmental improvement of the localities where we operate.”

Mexico: Cemex plans to start using hydrogen as part of its fuel mix at its cement plants around the world in 2021. The estimated cost of the roll-out is US$40m. The company says it completed the deployment of its hydrogen technology across all of its cement plants in Europe in 2020 following trials at the Alicante Cement Plant in Spain in mid- 2019.

Global operations, technical and energy vice-president Roberto Ponguta said, “The fast adoption of this new hydrogen-based technology is a clear example of Cemex's innovation efforts and its strong commitment to decarbonise the cement production process.” He added, "We continue to identify and deploy existing technologies which have a high potential to contribute to our sustainability goals, and hydrogen is a key lever.”

Europe: Cemex commissioned seven new bolt-on investments across Europe in January 2021. The company says that all of the investments are aligned to its key priorities of climate action, sustainable construction and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) growth. They include advances in fossil fuel reduction, lower CO₂ footprint products, circular economy investments and products that demonstrate life cycle CO₂ and energy consumption advantages for buildings. It made various changes at its cement plants, for example the installation of a new alternative fuel (AF) system in the Czech Republic. In France and the UK, it made circular economy and recycling improvements, and shifted to lower-CO₂ cement production in Croatia and lightweight concrete production in Spain. Additionally, it made efficiency upgrades to sites in Spain and the UK.

Europe, Middle East and Africa regional president Sergio Menendez said, “We have made a strong start to our 2021 ambitions to both grow our business and improve our climate impact. In 2020, we achieved our ambition of a 35% reduction in our CO₂ emissions compared to our 1990 baseline in Europe. We are also the first company in our sector to align our Europe operations to the EU aspiration to reduce CO₂ emissions by at least 55% by 2030. These investments represent further advances towards this 2030 target, as well as to deliver net zero CO₂ concrete globally by 2050.”

UK: The Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) has conducted a study into the emissions reduction practices of 33 large cement producers. The study concluded that five of the companies are currently aligned with the emissions reduction pathway which would keep the global temperature rise below 2°C by 2050 compared to pre-industrial levels. This corresponds to 15% of large cement companies assessed in the study compared to 14% of large companies in heavy industries globally. The TPI commended the five producers, noting that in global industry “fewer companies are aligned with 2°C after 2030 [than by 2030], because the pace of decarbonisation required in the industrial sector really picks up next decade, requiring drastic falls in emissions between 2030 and 2050 to meet Paris Agreement goals. More industrial companies need to set longer term targets to 2050 that require greater levels of decarbonisation.” Just one aluminium producer and no paper producers are in line with the 2050 target.

TPI Co-Chair Adam Matthews said, “As we enter the transition decade these hard-to-abate sectors are critical to achieving net zero goals by 2050. Whilst it is concerning that so few industrial companies are ready, it is clear new industrial processes based on circular economy principles give us a tipping point of technically viable, economically attractive solutions.”

Colombia: Cementos Argos transported around 50,000t of cement by train in 2020. It plans to increase this by 30% year-on-year to 70,000t in 2021 as part of its sustainability strategy. The cement producer has started using the Belencito - Bogotá and Puerto Triunfo - Puerto Wilches routes as the country has started to revive railway lines in recent years.

India: LafargeHolcim subsidiary ACC has launched its ECOPact range of reduced-CO₂ concrete products in Hyderabad and Mumbai. A full nationwide rollout will follow in February and March 2021.

Managing director Sridhar Balakrishnan said, "The innovative manufacturing process of the ECOPact range reduces CO₂ emissions by up to 100% and further enhances our sustainable products offerings for the construction industry.”

The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) looked like it might be about to hit Euro40/t this week. It still might. You can blame it on the current cold front bringing snow to much of Northern Europe and the bedding into of the fourth phase of the ETS that started in January 2021. In early 2020 analysts were generally predicting an average price of around Euro30/t by 2030 bolstered by volatility in the price due to the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the price recovered and so did the European Commission’s resolve to push through its European Green Deal. By mid-December 2020 the price had shot past Euro30/t and analysts were forecasting average prices of well over Euro50/t by 2030. Depending on one’s disposition this is the rate at which either serious decarbonisation attempts will begin to be viable for commercial companies, or the point at which more plants simply close.

Figure 1: European Union Emissions Trading System carbon market price in Euros (European Union Allowance), February 2020 – February 2021. Source: Sandbag.

One group which is well aware of the EU ETS and its consequences upon the cement industry is Cembureau, the European cement association. Some of its current lobbying efforts have been directed at trying to shape how the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) will appear in legislation proposals in June 2021. Its argument boils down to protecting its members from carbon leakage both in and out of the EU’s borders and maintaining free allocation until 2030 to ease the transition to a lower carbon economy. The former should find common ground. However, calls for a CO₂ charge exemption for EU exporters may perplex environmentalists, who might wonder how this could possibly encourage third party countries to introduce their own carbon pricing schemes. The latter is clearly pragmatism for an industry saying that it is facing change at a pace that may be too rapid for it to cope with. Concrete products do carry sustainability advantages over other building materials. Wiping out swathes of the region’s production base, simply because one knows exactly how much CO₂ they emit compared to rival building materials that one doesn’t, may not help the EU reach its climate commitments by 2050. As if to underline this fear, another European clinker line was earmarked for closure this week when Lafarge France announced the planned conversion of the Contes cement plant into a terminal.

Figure 2: Estimate of global cement production in 2018 by region. Source: Cembureau.

Figure 2 above puts the situation into a global perspective, showing that Cembureau’s members were responsible for below 7% of cement production in 2018. China produced an estimated 55% of global cement production in the same year. In terms of overall CO₂ emissions across all sources, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that China produced 30% of CO₂ emissions in 2018.

It seems odd then that the introduction of an interim ETS in China at the start of February 2021 didn’t receive more global news coverage. The new scheme covers 2225 power companies across the country. It follows pilot regional schemes that have run since 2011, covering seven provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong. Previously, the country’s largest local carbon market, the China Emissions Exchange (Guangzhou), was based in Guangdong province and it included power generation, cement, steel, and petrochemical sectors. State news agency Xinhua reports that this scheme reduced carbon emissions from these industries by 12% from 2013 to 2019. The new national ETS is expected to include cement and other industries at a later stage.

Commentators in the European press have pointed out that the Chinese national ETS is actually planning to make an effort on transparency and to force companies to publish their pollution data publicly. Yet, they’ve also said that the data may be inaccurate anyway, echoing the usual Western fears about Chinese figures. Other concerns include the method of giving out pollution permits rather than allocating them by auction as in other cap and trade systems, which could reduce the incentive to reduce emissions. It’s also worth pointing out that carbon was priced at US$6/t under the Chinese system compared to around US$35/t in the EU and US$17/t in California, US at the end of 2020. At this price it seems unlikely that the Chinese national ETS will encourage much change without other measures.

The EU and Chinese ETS are at different stages but the differences in scale are stark. When or if the Chinese one goes national across those eight core industries it will likely leapfrog over the EU ETS and become the world’s largest with an estimated 13,235MtCO₂e under its purview. By contrast, the EU ETS manages 1816MtC0₂e according to World Bank data. The kind of dilemmas Cembureau and others are tackling with the EU ETS such as carbon leakage and how fast to tighten the system against heavy emitters are illustrative to other schemes in China and elsewhere.

India: LafargeHolcim subsidiary Ambuja Cement has begun a trial of bio-diesel fuel blends for its shipping fleet. It says that the fuel change will reduce the fleet’s CO₂ emissions by 25%.

Managing Director and chief executive officer Neeraj Akhoury said, “With the introduction of bio-diesel blends, we are significantly contributing towards the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by introducing a suitable alternate green fuel that helps achieve our parent, LafargeHolcim’s, sustainability vision of ‘net zero pledge 2030’.”

Colombia: Switzerland-based finance company RobecoSAM has listed Cementos Argos in the Silver Class in its Sustainability Yearbook 2021. It chose the producer from among over 7000 companies from 61 industries on the basis of its Dow Jones Sustainability Index score.

Cementos Argos Legal and Sustainability vice president María Isabel Echeverri said, “Being included for the eighth consecutive year in the RobecoSAM Sustainability Yearbook encourages us to maintain our high sustainability standards and allows us to continue improving every day so that we can continue contributing to the development and growth of our clients and to the well-being of millions of people in all the territories in which we are present. This recognition is the result of the work of a team committed and convinced of the importance of creating value for society and for the company.”