Displaying items by tag: US

US: Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua (GCC) says that the upgrade to its Rapid City cement plant in South Dakota has started operation. The expansion has added 0.44Mt/yr of production capacity to the unit taking its total capacity to 1.18Mt/yr. The project cost US$105m and it started in 2016. Tie-in of the upgrade was finished in late November 2018. Production was suspended during the tie-in-process and has now resumed. The new facilities are now being stabilised.

“The Rapid City expansion comes at an opportune time, as our US cement plants are running nearly at full capacity, and we expect to see continued, steady growth in demand across our market area. We will be able to serve our customers better and operate our cement logistics network more efficiently with the additional capacity,” said Enrique Escalante, GCC’s chief executive officer (CEO).

GCC has 5.8Mt/yr of cement production capacity. Of this, 3.5Mt/yr is in the US, with plants in Pueblo in Colorado, Odessa in Texas, Tijeras in New Mexico, Trident in Montana and Rapid City in South Dakota. GCC expects to ramp up the new production capacity at Rapid City gradually over the next 18 to 24 months, in accordance with market conditions.

GCC’s cement production capacity in Mexico is 2.3Mt/yr from plants in Chihuahua, Juarez and Samalayuca in Chihuahua state. In the third quarter of 2018, GCC reactivated two idled kilns in Chihuahua to increase production of both oil well cement and construction cement.

US: France’s Fives Group has released detail about a project to upgrade the cement mill workshop at Giant Cement’s Harleyville plant in South Carolina. The contracts included the complete engineering, supply, fabrication, transport, installation and commissioning services for material handling, cement grinding and cement loading. New equipment included a clinker and additives transport circuit with a dedusting system, a classifying circuit with a FCB TSV Classifier, a new Fives TGT Filter, all gas and material connections as well as the ball mill internals revamping, a cement truck bulk loading area and a weighing station.

Engineering, offshore supplies and project management were handled by Fives FCB. Onshore supplies and all site works including civil and structural works, mechanical and electrical installations were covered by Fives Solios. Major milestones of the project included starting civil works in November 2017. Mechanical and electrical erection work ran from February to July 2018. First cement production was on 29 June 2018.

US: Aggregate Industries, a US subsidiary of LafargeHolcim, has secured the contract to provide concrete for the US$2bn Minneapolis-area Southwest Light Rail Transit (LRT) extension of the Metro Green Line. The new line will run 14.5 miles from downtown Minneapolis to the suburb of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and require construction of 16 new stations, plus the rail infrastructure itself. The project will require an estimated 0.30Mm³ of ready-mix concrete. It includes the construction of 44 structures, 29 new bridges, two cut and cover tunnels, six pedestrian tunnels, 15 at-grade crossings, 110 retaining walls and over 45,000m of track.

US: Claudius Peters has been awarded the ‘Innovator of the Year’ award in the Design & Manufacturing category at the Autodesk University (AU) Las Vegas in November 2018. It was given due to changes Claudius Peters made to its engineering and business processes, which led in turn to a ’generative design’ approach to some of its largest manufactured components, including its clinker cooler product. The equipment manufacturer has adopted an agile project management system similar to that used in computer software development. It has removed traditional departmental barriers between engineering and manufacturing teams and replaced them with ‘scrum’ teams of 5 to 9 persons.

“Our project team included young people who embraced this new concept and understood that the electric light didn’t come from the continuous improvement of candles. It needed a complete change. That’s how we came to try generative design. By inputting the project parameters, computers can do the heavy lifting, freeing up our engineers to innovate,” said Thomas Nagel, Chief Digital Officer at Claudius Peters.

Argentina/US: US law firm Howard G Smith has filed a class action lawsuit against Argentina’s Loma Negra on behalf of investors that purchased securities in the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in late 2017. The legal complaint alleges that the cement producer misled investors by: misrepresenting Loma Negra's exposure to a corruption scandal affecting its owner, Brazil’s InterCement; misrepresenting demand for Loma Negra’s products; misrepresenting the general state of the Argentine economy; and including references to known potential risks that had already happened.

Loma Negra launched its IPO in November 2017. Since then cement sales in Argentina have fallen year-on-year in the second half of 2018 and the general economy has floundered. The local competition body, the National Commission for Protection of Competition, also started an investigation into alleged collusion and coordinated behaviour in the cement industry in May 2018

Australia: Research by the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) forecasts that CO₂ emissions will grow by 2.7% year-on-year to a 37.1 ± 2 Gt CO₂ in 2018. This follows a rise of 1.6% to 36.2Gt after a three-year hiatus with stable global emissions. The 2018 forecast is based on preliminary data for the first 6 – 9 months indicate a renewed growth in fossil CO₂ emissions based on national emission projections for China, the US, the European Union (EU) and India and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world.

In 2017 the GCB estimates that cement sector constituted 4% of global fossil CO₂ emissions, a rise of 1.2% from 2016. Emissions are expected to grow by 4% in China in 2018, in part due to a 1% rise in cement production. In the EU emissions are projected to fall by 0.7% with stable cement sector emissions. In India emissions are forecast to increase by 6.3% with a 13.4% rise in cement sector emissions.

Fossil CO₂ emissions are based on energy statistics and cement production data. The research makes its estimate of emissions from the cement industry using a method adapted from a paper published by Robbie M Andrew of Norway’s CICERO Center for International Climate Research in 2017.

US: France’s Fives has opened a new sales office for its cement and minerals businesses. The new location is intended to better address the US market to promote FCB technologies and services for the cement and minerals industries, in the fields of equipment, systems, revamping and complete line projects.

US: The Portland Cement Association (PCA) has elected Tom Beck, president of Continental Cement Company, as the chairman of the PCA board of directors in 2019. Ron Henley, president of GCC of America, was elected vice chairman at a PCA board meeting in late October 2018. Beck takes over the PCA board chairmanship role from Allen Hamblen, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of CalPortland Company.

A past chairman of the American Concrete Pavement Association, Beck served as Senior Vice President at Continental Cement from 1996 to 2013, and held a variety of positions with Holnam from 1987 to 1996. Prior to joining GCC of America, Henley was President of Boral Construction Materials. He is also a board member of the Denver Scholarship Fund.

US: Lehigh Cement has applied to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to expand the quarry at its Nazareth cement plant. It wants to increase its mining area by a third to 112 hectares from 84 hectares according to the Express-Times newspaper. A public consultation period on the application will run until late December 2018.

US: Mississippi Lime Company plans to ‘significantly’ increase enhanced hydrated lime capacities at its Weirton, West Virginia and Verona, Kentucky plants. It also manufactures hydrated lime products from its Ste Genevieve, Missouri, Vicksburg, Mississippi and Chester, South Carolina operations. The company produces high calcium quicklime, hydrated lime and calcium carbonate.