Displaying items by tag: Sweden
Switzerland/Sweden: ABB and Sweden-based Salt X have agreed to develop Electric Arc Calcination (EAC) technology, with ABB also becoming a Salt X minority shareholder. This partnership aims to decarbonise cement production and similar industries by replacing fossil fuel-based heating with renewable energy and CO2 capture during calcination. ABB will enhance the EAC with control and electrical systems, contributing to the technology's commercialisation.
Salt X CEO Carl-Johan Linér said "This strengthens us as a company and enables us to progress with our growth plans. With ABB and our other partners, we can significantly improve our capability to take a leading role in the electrification wave sweeping through the industrial sector.”
ABB's Global Growth Industries Business Line Manager Michael Marti said, "Our collaboration with Salt X marks a significant milestone in this journey. The technology benefits are two-fold; replacing the use of fossil fuels through renewable electricity in the calcination process and enabling cost efficient capture of the carbon emissions at the same time. It will be a highly effective way of curbing lime production emissions.”
Denmark: Norway-based Geminor has appointed Per Mernelius as Country Manager for Geminor Denmark. He succeeds Kasper Thomsen in the position, who was recently appointed as the Operations Director for Geminor Group. Mernelius is currently the Country Manager for Sweden and he will add the new responsibilities to this role. Initially, he will be in charge of the Danish market for 12 months, pending the appointment of a new country manager in Denmark.
Mernelius commented “Denmark and Sweden are our two biggest downstream markets, with nearly 1Mt of imported refuse-derived fuel/solid recovered fuel in 2023. As such, many similarities open up for synergies in the coming year. An important factor is logistics, and how we can coordinate the two markets for more efficient operations. Our ambition is to grow further and to cater for the existing over-capacity within energy recovery in Scandinavia.”
Mernelius has worked for Geminor since 2016. Before this he worked for Sweden-based energy supplier Jönköping Energi. He is a graduate of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Peter Erbel appointed as Country Manager, Germany at CheckProof
21 February 2024Germany: Sweden-based CheckProof has appointed Peter Erbel as its Country Manager, Germany. Erbel previously worked for FLSmidth and associated companies from 2007 to 2023 in sales, product and project management roles.
CheckProof is a software-as-a-service company supplying heavy industry markets including aggregate, asphalt, cement, ready mix concrete and heavy machinery. The company says it has seen strong, continual growth in Germany and appointing Erbel is planned to support existing clients and grow the business in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. CheckProof has clients in 38 countries.
FLSmidth Cement sells MAAG gears and drives business to Solix
24 January 2024Denmark/Sweden: FLSmidth Cement has sold its MAAG gears and drives business to the Sweden-based investment company Solix Group for an undisclosed sum. The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of 2024 and includes all related assets, including intellectual property, technology, employees and customer contracts. FLSmidth said that the divestment was is in line with its Green'26 strategy, which in combination with a greater strategic focus on the service business includes focusing the product portfolio on the core technologies required for a potential green transition in the cement industry.
The MAAG product range includes a wide range of industrial gear solutions for all types of mills and kilns, gear solutions for bucket-wheel excavators and belt conveyors, as well as many other heavy-duty applications used in the cement, mining and other industries. The business has an average turnover of around Euro55 – 65m/yr.
Christopher Ashworth, the president of FLSmidth Cement, said “The divestment is fully aligned with our ongoing transformation efforts and supports our Green'26 strategy. I would like to extent my gratitude to the dedicated employees in the MAAG business for their unwavering commitment to supplying high-quality solutions and services. I wish all the MAAG employees and Solix the very best going forward."
CemVision to supply low carbon cement to LKAB
26 December 2023Sweden: CemVision has announced its first commercial agreement to sell its low carbon cement. Pilot deliveries are scheduled to begin in March 2024 to LKAB. Further commercial agreements are planned over the next four years. CemVision produces its Re-ment product using industrial residual products such as those from the steel and mining sectors instead of limestone.
Anders Lundgren, Chief Sustainability Officer for Business Area Special Products at LKAB, said “The letter of intent include the pilot deliveries and trial use of CemVision’s products in our concrete production, and intent to source from their future full-scale production, which presents a potential to further enhance the circularity and to decarbonise our supply of cement and addressing our emissions in the supply chain.”
Dalmia Cement (Bharat) and SaltX Technology to launch electric cement production pilot
12 December 2023India: Sweden-based SaltX Technology has partnered with Dalmia Cement (Bharat) to launch a pilot trial of fuel-free cement production using its electric arc calciner (EAC) in 2024. The pilot plant will be situated at Dalmia Cement (Bharat)’s Rajganga Nagpur cement plant in Odisha. Pre-study work, including material tests at SaltX Technology's test and research centre in Hofors, Sweden, will commence in early 2024.
Dalmia Cement (Bharat) managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) Mahendra Singhi said "In line with our ambition to further reduce our carbon footprint, we are delighted to collaborate with SaltX, a leading innovator with electrification and carbon capture technology that has great potential to play a decisive role in our intense work to reduce our carbon emissions."
SaltX Technology CEO Carl-Johan Linér said "I am pleased to confirm that we have now started working together on-site for the upcoming pilot in India. We have met all key individuals in the project and look forward with confidence to starting the pre-study next year."
Building codes and low-embodied carbon building materials
15 November 2023Last week the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced that it was investing US$2bn on over 150 construction projects that use low-embodied carbon (LEC) materials. The funding is intended to support the use of US-manufactured low carbon asphalt, concrete, glass and steel as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. For readers who don’t know, the GSA manages federal government property and provides contracting options for government agencies. As part of this new message, it will spend US$767m on LEC concrete on federal government buildings projects following a pilot that started in May 2023. The full list of the projects can be found here.
This is relevant because the US-based ready-mixed concrete (RMX) market has been valued roughly at around US$60bn/yr. One estimate of how much the US federal government spent on concrete was around US$5bn in 2018. So the government buys a significant minority of RMX in the country, and if it starts specifying LEC products, this will affect the industry. And, at present at least, a key ingredient of all that concrete is cement.
This isn’t the first time that legislators in the US have specified LEC concrete. In 2019 Marin County in California introduced what it said was the world’s first building code that attempted to minimise carbon emissions from concrete production. It did this by setting maximum ordinary Portland cement (OPC) and embodied carbon levels and offering several ways suppliers can achieve this, including increasing the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), using admixtures, optimising concrete mixtures and so on. Unlike the GSA’s approach in November 2023 though, this applies to all plain and reinforced concrete installed in the area, not just a portion of procured concrete via a government agency. Other similar regional schemes in the US include limits on embodied carbon levels in RMX in Denver, Colorado, and a reduction in the cement used in RMX in Berkeley, California. Environmental services company Tangible compiled a wider list of embodied carbon building codes in North America that can be viewed here. This grouping also includes the use of building intensity policies, whole building life cycle assessments (LCA), environmental product declarations (EPD), demolition and deconstruction directives, tax incentives and building reuse plans.
Government-backed procurement codes promoting or requiring the use of LEC building materials for infrastructure projects have been around for a while in various places. The general trend has been to start with measurement via tools such as LCAs and EPDs, move on to government procurement and then start setting embodied carbon limits for buildings. In the US the GSA’s latest pronouncement follows on from the Federal Buy Clean Initiative and from when California introduced its Buy Clean California Act in 2017. Outside of the US similar programmes have been introduced in countries including Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. On the corporate side members of the World Economic Forum’s First Movers’ Coalition have committed to purchasing or specifying volumes of LEC cement and/or concrete by 2030. Examples of whole countries actually setting embodied carbon emissions limits for non-government buildings are rarer, but some are emerging. Both France and Sweden, for example, introduced laws in 2022 that start by analysing life-cycle emissions of buildings and will move on to setting embodied carbon limits in the late 2020s. Denmark, Finland and New Zealand are also in the process of introducing similar schemes. The next big move could be in the EU, where legislators are considering embodied carbon limits for building materials as part of its ongoing revisions to its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive or the Construction Products Regulation legislations. Lobbying, debate and arguing remains ongoing at present.
To finish, Ireland-based Ecocem spent a period in the 2010s attempting to build a slag cement grinding plant at Vallejo, Solano County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. The project met with considerable local opposition on environmental grounds and was eventually refused planning permission. The irony is that slag cement is one of those SCM-style cements that Marin County, also in the San Francisco Bay Area, started encouraging the use of just a few years later. Ecocem held its inaugural science symposium in Paris this week. A number of scientists who attended the event called for existing low carbon technologies to be adopted by the cement and concrete sectors as fast as possible. One such approach is to lower the clinker factor in cement through the use of products that Ecocem and other companies sell. A point to consider is, if Marin County’s code or the GSA’s recent procurement directive came earlier, then that slag plant in Vallejo might have been built. Encouraging the use of LEC building materials by governments looks set to proliferate but it may not be a straightforward process. Clear and consistent policies will be key.
SaltX and SMA Mineral agree plant for electrified lime plants
05 September 2023Sweden: SaltX Technology and SMA Mineral have agreed a joint roadmap until 2028 to work on developing and building electrified lime plants. The agreement means that mineral producer SMA Mineral plans to build several units where SaltX's electric arc calciner (EAC) technology will be installed. The companies have worked together since mid-2022.
Carl-Johan Linér, the chief executive officer at SaltX, said "We have now signed a long-term cooperation agreement in which the respective parties' roles and responsibilities are regulated, which is an important step for both parties."
SaltX Technology is intended to allow SMA Mineral to halve its CO2 emissions by 2027. The agreement allows SMA Mineral to use the EAC technology to produce quicklime in the Nordic region. The forecast is that SaltX will receive orders for 7 - 9 EAC units from SMA Mineral during the contract period. SaltX intends to market and sell the EAC technology to lime manufacturers outside the Nordic region and other stakeholders, such as cement manufacturers, worldwide. SaltX and SMA Mineral are accelerating work on SMA Mineral’s first electric lime plant at Mo i Rana.
Indonesia: Sweden-based Bruks Siwertell has received an order for two 10 000 S road-mobile ship unloaders for use in cement handling in Sumatra. The new road-mobile units are scheduled for delivery later in 2023 and will support a cement handling capacity of 300t/hr, discharging vessels up to 10,000dwt. Jörgen Ojeda, Bruks Siwertell’s Sales Director Mobile Unloaders, said that the two road-mobile models would add to a range of Siwertell screw-type dry bulk handling systems already delivered to the region including four large-scale Siwertell ship unloaders and one ship loader.
Sweden: Nordkalk has produced lime at its Koping lime plant using 30% biofuel as alternative fuel (AF). The producer now aims to increase the substitution rate to 50%. Nordkalk subsidiary Kalkproduktion Storugns recently began trialling 100% liquid biofuel substitution in continuous operations at its Larbro lime plant. ENP Newswire has reported that both projects are part of a CO2 emissions reduction initiative in partnership with the Swedish Energy Agency and Umea University.