Displaying items by tag: UltraTech Cement
India: The board of directors of UltraTech Cement has approved the addition of an extra 22.6Mt/yr-worth of cement production capacity across the company's footprint. The new additions will span all of India and consists of both new plant builds and expansions. New capacity will commence production in a phased manner from mid-2024. UltraTech Cement expects to invest US$1.61bn in the growth phase.
Chair Kumar Mangalam Birla said "The Aditya Birla Group’s pace of activity, range of businesses and depth of global presence provide a useful compass to navigate this age of disruption. Against the backdrop of our long history as a group, dynamism leaps out as a common theme. Over the years, we have witnessed multiple business cycles. Across businesses and markets, our evolution is a story of continuous renewal and regeneration, as we aggressively invest in growth and create long-term value for all stakeholders."
Fuel costs in India, August 2022
17 August 2022Fuels procurement and costs have been weighing on the minds of Indian cement producers since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Two news stories this week show some of this. The first concerns recent imports of petcoke from Venezuela. The second covers the closure of captive power plants due to domestic shortages of coal.
At the same time, as the financial results for cement companies for the first quarter of the Indian 2023 financial year have been released, one constant has been hefty hikes in power and fuel costs. Graph 1 below gives a rough idea of the jump in costs major producers have been contending with. One point to note is that, possibly, the larger cement companies may have been better at slowing down the cost inflation from fuel. However, the prevalence of waste heat recovery installations and alternative fuels usage may also be a factor here. Finally, the company approved to buy Ambuja Cement and ACC, Adani Group, also runs India’s biggest coal trader. It will be interesting to see in the medium term how this might affect the fuel costs for its new cement division.
Graph 1: Comparison of Power & Fuel costs for selected Indian cement producers in first quarter of 2022 and 2023 financial years. Source: Company financial reports.
The Venezuelan story demonstrates the greater lengths that Indian cement producers are now going to secure fuel supplies. Reuters reports that cement companies imported at least 160,000t of petcoke from the South American country between April and June 2022 and that more was on the way. JSW Cement, Ramco Cements and Orient Cement are among them. The Venezuelan oil industry has been under US economic sanctions since 2019 but byproducts such as petcoke are not covered by this. Its petcoke has apparently been discounted by 5 - 10% below the price of US alternatives.
Indian cement producers have been prepared to risk US sanctions further by importing coal from Russia. The Business Standard newspaper, using data from Coalmint, reported that Russia became India’s third largest source of coal imports, at 2.06Mt, in July 2022. Before the war it was the sixth-largest source of coal to the country. Again, Reuters covered how cement companies were doing this in July 2022, when it revealed that UltraTech Cement had used India-based HDFC Bank to purchase coal using Chinese Renminbi, not the US Dollar as is more common for international purchases of commodities. In a conference call for the release of its first quarter results, UltraTech Cement’s chief financial officer Atul Daga confirmed the purchase and described it as “opportunistic.” He added that, “If something more surfaces, we will pick it up.” As the data for July 2022 shows, it may or may not be UltraTech Cement that is buying Russian coal right now but other parties in India certainly are.
Some of the wider economic implications about India buying Russian coal in the face of US and European sanctions include whether any retaliation might be forthcoming and a general sign that the dominance of the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency is not guaranteed. The former seems doubtful given the size of India’s markets. Yet if the sanctions against Russia drag on then a shift in the global economic status quo becomes more likely, especially if opportunistic purchases become regular ones.
The situation facing captive power plants illustrates one more turn of the screw on energy costs for industrial manufacturers. 30% of captive power plants in India are reportedly closed due to the high cost of coal or an inability to even import it. Although it is worth noting that it is unclear whether, proportionally, more or less of these are serving cement plants. As N Srinivasan, the vice-chairman and managing director of India Cements told the Business Standard newspaper, “Most of our plants have coal based captive power generation. The cost of captive generation is now more than the grid cost. Hence, we shut down all captive power units and resorted to grid power.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast in July 2022 that Indian coal demand would grow by 3% year-on-year to 1.16Bnt in 2023 due to expanded electrification and economic growth. In its view, global coal demand will be driven principally by China but also by India to a lesser extent. However, unhelpfully, it added that uncertainty was also rising with ongoing developments in the war in Ukraine having a prominent effect. This is unlikely to assist Indian cement producers and their fuel buyers who will be asking themselves: how long will the current situation last and can the prices be passed on to consumers? There is one small silver lining in the current group of economic storm clouds hanging over cement producers at least. The second quarter of the Indian financial year is monsoon season, when economic activity slows down. It won’t slow the trend down but it may reduce the fuel bill a little.
UltraTech Cement raises US$94.6m from commercial papers sale
11 August 2022India: UltraTech Cement has received US$94.6m-worth in commitments on a planned sale of its commercial papers. Reuters News has reported that the papers will reach maturity in November 2022.
ThyssenKrupp Industries India reveals details of orders with UltraTech Cement, Shree Cement and Hills Cement
10 August 2022India: ThyssenKrupp Industries India has reported information on recent orders with UltraTech Cement, Shree Cement and Hills Cement.
Its Polysius division has secured an order from UltraTech Cement for the design, engineering and supply of two 10,000t/day pyro processing lines with Polycom rolls for raw materials grinding.
Shree Cement has ordered pyro processing equipment including a Polytrack clinker cooler for a new cement plant at Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. ThyssenKrupp Industries India noted that it was the “maiden plant order” from Shree Cement and of “great strategic importance to us.”
Hills Cement has also made a first order with ThyssenKrupp. In this case it has requested pyro processing equipment including a clinker cooler for the second production line at its plant in Meghalaya.
India: Holcim subsidiaries ACC and Ambuja Cements, along with Dalmia Cement, Shree Cement, UltraTech Cement and 15 other Indian cement producers, have violated antitrust laws through price collusion and supply restriction, a Competition Commission of India (CCI) investigation has uncovered. Reuters News has reported that regular price rises in the Indian cement market were the outcome of collusion between producers, which set target prices by district and carried out twice weekly inspections of participant companies’ operations. Senior executives from ACC and UltraTech Cement, among other companies, served as state-wide coordinators. They planned and carried out their deception by means including messaging platform WhatsApp.
ACC and UltraTech Cement, along with ACC’s fellow Holcim subsidiary Ambuja Cements, declined to comment, however Holcim said “The Indian companies are managing this matter responsibly and we expect them to continue to do so accordingly."
India: UltraTech Cement plans to increase its installed cement production capacity to 154Mt/yr by the beginning of the 2026 financial year on 1 April 2025. The increase represents a composite annual growth rate of 10% from 115Mt/yr at the start of the 2023 financial year. The Economic Times newspaper has reported that the producer plans to carry out the expansion in two phases.
Indian domestic cement consumption is forecast to continue growing by 5% year-on-year over a five-year period to July 2027.
India: UltraTech Cement increased its sales by 28% year-on-year to US$1.9bn in the first quarter of its 2023 financial year, from US$1.48bn in the first quarter of the 2022 financial year. The company’s net profit during the quarter was US$198m, down by 7% year-on-year from US$213m in the first quarter of the 2022 financial year.
Dow Jones Institutional News has reported that UltraTech Cement recorded increased cement demand in June 2022 and forecasts full-year year-on-year consumption growth nationally. The producer said that state-backed investment in infrastructure and industrial development will support high housing demand momentum, while pressure will remain on its profitability due to high costs.
India: The Indian Ministry of Mines and Indian Bureau of Mines have awarded UltraTech Cement Five Star ratings for 10 limestone mines across India. Assessment took place within the Indian mining Sustainable Development Framework, which quantifies sustainability, efficiency, land use and resettlement, besides other social impacts.
UltraTech Cement declines to pay US$126m for Jaiprakash Associates cement plant in Uttar Pradesh
05 July 2022India: UltraTech Cement has declined to pay US$126m for a 3Mt/yr cement plant in Uttar Pradesh which it acquired from Jaiprakash Associates in 2017. The Economic Times newspaper has reported that the acquisition was part of a US$2.05bn deal covering 21.2Mt/yr-worth of cement capacity across six cement plants and five grinding plants. With environmental clearances pending on the Uttar Pradesh plant, the companies had agreed to a delayed final payment for the US$126m asset, to be made on 30 June 2022. UltraTech Cement says that it is unwilling to pay for the plant ‘in the present circumstances,’ given that the required clearances are still lacking. The group is reportedly seeking a revaluation of the plant down to US$78.3m.
Update on electric cement kilns
15 June 2022Coolbrook has been in the news recently with collaboration deals struck with Cemex and UltraTech Cement. First the Finland-based company officially launched its Roto Dynamic Heater (RDH) technology with a memorandum of understanding signed with Cemex in May 2022. Then, this week, it signed a similar agreement with UltraTech Cement.
The specifics of either agreement are unknown but the target is clearly to build an industrial pilot of an electric kiln – or something like it - at a cement plant. Coolbrook says it has run a pilot of its RDH technology in Finland. Further tests are now scheduled to continue for two years starting from September 2022 at the Brightlands Chemelot Campus at Geleen in the Netherlands. Commercial scale demonstrations are scheduled from 2022 with the hope of commercial use from 2024. Links with Cemex and UltraTech Cement seem to suggest progress. At the same time Coolbrook will be testing its RotoDynamic Reactor (RDR) technology, which promises to electrify the steam cracking process used in plastic manufacturing.
Publically available details on the RDH technology are light. In its promotional material Coolbrook says that it can achieve process temperatures of up to around 1700°C. This is crucial to achieve full clinker formation in a cement kiln. Reaching this temperature with non-combustion style kilns, such as solar reactors, has previously been a problem. Notably, Synhelion and Cemex said in February 2022 that they had managed to produce clinker using concentrated solar radiation. Retrofit possibilities and compact equipment size are also mentioned in the promotional material for the RDH. The former is an obvious attraction but size of equipment footprint is increasingly emerging as a potential issue for cement plants looking to reduce their CO2 emissions. Rick Bohan from the Portland Cement Association (PCA) presented a summary of the potential and problems of emerging carbon capture and utilisation/storage (CCUS) technologies for cement plants in the US at the Virtual Global CemCCUS Seminar that took place on 14 June 2022. He noted that installing CCUS equipment makes cement plants start to look different (more like petrochemical plants in the view of Global Cement Weekly) and that they may require more space to install it all.
Coolbrook hasn’t been the only organisation looking at kiln electrification. The installation with the most available information on kiln electrification has been the Decarbonate project, led by the VTT, formerly known as the Technical Research Centre of Finland. The project has built a pilot rotary kiln with a length of 8m inside a shipping container. It has a production capacity of around 25kg/hr. The system reportedly uses fixed radiant heating coils around the kiln, surrounded by insulation materials. Early results presented to the 1st Virtual Global CemPower Seminar in late 2021 were that the kiln started up, sufficient calcination was occurring and the system was operated continuously for three days at a temperature of 1000°C with no problems reported. Further research was scheduled to carry on into 2022 with longer trials planned for three different materials.
HeidelbergCement’s subsidiary in Sweden, Cementa, completed a feasibility study on implementing electrified cement production at its Slite plant in 2019. It then said that it was conducting further study with electricity producer Vattenfall as part of CemZero project. This consists of three projects running to 2025. Namely: heat transfer with plasma in rotary kilns; direct separation of carbon dioxide from calcination of carbonate-based raw materials in the production of cement clinker and burnt lime; and carbon dioxide-free products with electrified production - reactivity of cement clinker with secondary additives. HeidelbergCement has since announced plans to build a full scale 1.8Mt/yr carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at the Slite cement plant by 2030.
How this would fit with any kiln electrification plans is unknown. However, one attraction of moving to an electrical kiln, for all of the projects above, is to cut out the 40 – 50% of a cement plant’s CO2 emissions that arise from the fuel that is burnt. Taking a kiln electric also makes CO2 capture easier. Much of the remainder of the CO2 released comes from the decomposition of limestone during calcination when clinker is created. Substitute out fossil or alternative fuels and the flue gas becomes much purer CO2.
It is early days for cement kiln electrification but progress is happening both commercially and scientifically. The next step to watch out for will be the first pilot installation at a cement plant. One point to finish with is a comment that Rick Bohan made at the IEEE-IAS/PCA Cement Industry Technical Conference that took place in May 2022: carbon capture is expected to double a cement plant’s energy consumption. Kiln electrification is one potential route for cement production to reach net zero. CCUS is another. If one or both occur then a low carbon future could be a high energy one also.
Watch out for Global Cement’s forthcoming interview with Coolbrook in the September 2022 issue of Global Cement Magazine
For more on CCUS, download the proceedings pack for the Virtual Global CemCCUS Seminar 2022