Displaying items by tag: Waste Heat Recovery

One graph the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Global Warming of 1.5°C didn’t include this week was what happens if the world just doesn’t bother. It’s probably just as well since warming of 1.5°C is likely to happen between 2030 and 2052 at the current rate of climate mitigation efforts. If they had included such as diagram, it likely would have had a ominous red line hurtling skywards like a rollercoaster track just before the screams start.

The giant paper study is really about comparing and contrasting the different impacts and responses to a 1.5°C and a 2°C rise. One taste of what the higher rise threatens is, “limiting global warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves, and about 65 million fewer people being exposed to exceptional heatwaves."

The cement industry gets a look-in with an acknowledgment that the sector contributes a ‘small’ amount (5%) of total industrial CO₂ emissions. It then breaks the entire industrial sector’s mitigation strategies down to (a) reductions in the demand, (b) energy efficiency, (c) increased electrification of energy demand, (d) reducing the carbon content of non-electric fuels and (e) deploying innovative processes and application of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Speaking generally, phasing out coal, electrification and saving energy in mechanisms like waste heat recovery is predicted to get industry only so far. Yet from here even skirting over 1.5°C but below 2°C is ‘difficult to achieve’ without the, “major deployment of new sustainability-oriented low-carbon industrial processes.” Such new process include full oxy-fuelling kilns for clinker production, which have not been tested at the industrial scale yet. Likewise, CCS is seen as a major part of keeping warming below 2°C with a target of 3 Gt CO₂/yr by 2050. Some reality is present though when the report says that the development of such projects has been slow, since only two large-scale industrial CCS projects outside of oil and gas processing are in operation and that cost is high. It even posits a value of up to US$188t/CO₂ (!) for the cost of CO₂ avoided from a Global CCS Institute report.

None of this is new to cement producers. The real debate is how to get there without wiping out the industry. In his address to the recent VDZ conference, Christian Knell, the president of the German Cement Works Association (VDZ), highlighted that meeting climate change goals was leading to ‘considerable’ costs for the cement industry. He then called for policy-related support to on-going research projects into CO₂ mitigation technology.

The bit that the IPCC doesn’t go into is how much those five steps to the industrial sector will cost cement producers and, vitally, who will pay for it. For example, taking a cement plant’s co-processing rate to 70% and building a waste-heat recovery system, might cost around US$30m. The Low Emissions Intensity Lime And Cement (LEILAC) Consortium’s Calix’s direct CO₂ separation process pilot at the Lixhe cement plant in Belgium has funding of about Euro20m. Rolling all three of these measures out to the world’s 2300 cement plants would cost over US$100bn and it would take more than a decade. Beware, the financial figures here are rough estimates and may be way out. The point remains that the implementation costs will not be trivial.

Industry advocates have started in recent years to push back against the climate lobby by highlighting the essential nature of concrete to the modern world. The IPCC barely mentioned this aspect of cement’s contribution to society suggesting recycling, using more renewable materials, like wood, and resorting to the mitigation strategies detailed above. Building new cities out of wood is not inconceivable but CCS seems more likely to solve the climate problem at this stage. Manufacturing the cement that becomes concrete may create CO₂ emissions but it has also built the modern world and raised living standards universally. No cement means no civilisation. There is, at present, no alternative.

Instead of leaving this discussion at an impasse, it is worth reflecting on the last week in the industry’s news. An Indian cement company is importing fly ash, several companies are opening or preparing cement grinding plants, a coal ash extraction pilot project is running, a waste heat recovery unit has opened at a plant in Turkey and a producer is getting ready to co-process tyres as a fuel in Oman. All of these stories are proof that change is happening. The trick for policymakers is to keep prodding the cement sector in this direction without disrupting the good things the industry does for people’s lives through sustainable housing and infrastructure.

The November 2018 issue of Global Cement Magazine will include an exclusive article by Mahendra Singhi, the CEO of Dalmia Cement, about his company’s CO₂ mitigation efforts.

The 2nd FutureCem Conference on CO₂ reduction strategies for the cement industry will take place in May 2019 in London, UK.

Turkey: Sanko Holding is planning start a 7MW waste heat recovery (WHR) unit, supplied by Italy’s CTP Team, at its Cimko Narli Cement plant in early 2019. CTP Team signed a turnkey contract for the WHR unit in March 2018. It will be the first unit in Turkey to use Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) technology. The unit will provide approximately 12% of the current plant’s electricity needs, with an annual uptime efficiency of 7920hr and energy of 36kWhr/yr.

“The project will be the first project based on ORC technology with a thermal oil loop in Turkey for heat recovery from the cement industry,” said CTP Team Assistant General Manager Acelya Arik and Sales Director Marco Ernesto Donghi when the contract was signed. They added that since the project is the first ORC-based heat recovery plant in a Turkish cement plant it will be a milestone that will push further WHR projects in this field.

South Korea: Ssangyong Cement has launched what it says is the world’s largest waste heat recovery unit at its Donghae plant in Gangwon. The 43.5MWh unit had a budget of US$889m and was originally planned to 2016, according to the
Maeil Business Newspaper. 11 boilers plus turbines and cooling towers have been installed on six cement kilns at the site. The new system will also work in conjunction with an energy storage system (ESS) that was installed in April 2017.

Turkey: Shanghai Triumph Energy Conservation Engineering Co Ltd has won a waste heat recovery (WHR) project at Bartin Çimento from Turkey’s Sanko Holding, which operates the plant. It will have a recovery capacity of 5MW from the 3700t/day facility. The project will be carried out on an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) basis.

Shanghai Triumph plans to install two boilers and one power generation system. It will use two boilers from Mitsubishi Corporation, with the power generator likely to be sourced from Kubota Corporation.

Nigeria: A group of investors from the US have visited Ibeto Cement’s Nigercem plant in Nkalagu. The visit was part of an assessment to prepare Ibeto Cement for a listing on a stock exchange in the US, according to the This Day newspaper. Cletus Madubugwu Ibeto, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Ibeto Group said that Chinese contractors were due to work on upgrading the plant to a production capacity of 6000t/day with a 45MW waste heat recovery unit. In May 2018 Beta Cement signed an investment deal with US-based private equity firm Milost Global for US$850m.

Italy: Exergy has signed a contract with Cementi Rossi for a 3.5MW organic rankine cycle (ORC) waste heat recovery (WHR) system to be installed at the Pederobba plant near Treviso. The scope of the contract includes engineering, design, site erection, commissioning and start up of the power plant and a long term after sales service.

Exergy designed a customized and compact ORC solution to convert approximately 16MWt available from exhaust heat in the clinker cooler into 3.5MW of electricity utilising an air cooled condensing system, a radial outflow turbine as expander and choosing a non-flammable fluid to grant maximum safety during plant operation. The electricity produced by the ORC module will feed approximately the 30% of the energy demand of the cement plant.

“Our ORC WHR systems, leveraging on the higher efficiency of the radial outflow turbine, can help to boost at maximum level the performance of cement plants. For Cementi Rossi in particular we worked to supply a tailor made solution, choosing a non-flammable fluid in the cycle and a very compact plant design with a high level of prefabricated components to reduce costs and time for erection,” said Claudio Spadacini, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Exergy.

India: UltraTech Cement plans to build five waste heat recovery (WHR) units with an investment of US$72.6m. The new WHR units will have a capacity of 63MW and they will take the company’s total WHR capacity to 121MW, according to the Hindu newspaper. It is anticipated that the cement producer will be able to meet half of its power requirements from its WHR plants. They are also intended to protect the company from changes in the price of coal.

India: UltraTech Cement has commissioned a 1.75Mt/yr grinding unit at its Manawar plant in Dhar District, Madhya Pradesh. The main part of the 2.5Mt/yr integrated plant was commissioned in April 2018. A 13MW waste heat recovery unit is also being built at the site.

South Korea: Ssangyong Cement plans to install a waste heat recovery (WHR) unit at its Donghae plant in Gangwon. The upgrade will be operational by August 2018, according to the Maeil Business Newspaper. The new unit is expected to save the cement producer about 33% of its electricity costs or US$24m/yr.

The investment is the largest that the cement producer’s owner Hahn & Company has approved since it took control. The WHR will work with an energy storage system (ESS) that was installed in March 2018. The ESS saves power consumption by storing energy during the night and then using it during the day. The 22MWhr storage system is power by powered by 2880 batteries. The company said that it would save it at least US$2.4m/yr.

Ssangyong Cement’s Donghae plant is one of the largest in the world with a cement production capacity of 11.2Mt/yr across seven production lines. It occupies an areas of 11.3MM².

Italy/Switzerland/Turkey: Turboden has released information on its latest waste heat recovery (WHR) projects using its ORC turbogenerator for cement plants in Turkey, Switzerland and Italy.

In Turkey CTP Team and CTN Group have signed an order with Turboden for the supply of a 7MW ORC WHR unit with air cooled condenser to be installed in Çimko Çemento Narli’s plant. Turboden says that since the plant is located in an area where there is no water available for the cooling system, the ORC technology offer advantages over steam technology.

In Switzerland CadCime SA and LafargeHolcim have ordered a 1.3MW WHR unit that recovers heat from the existing pressurised water circuit, used for the district heating network. The order is the third from LafargeHolcim for an ORC unit from Turboden.

In Italy a 2MW WHR plant with direct heat exchange is being installed at Cementi Rossi’s plant. Start-up is schedule for the second quarter of 2018. This project received an award from the European Commission under the framework of Horizon 2020, whose main objective is to develop new solutions to recover waste heat in energy intensive industries such as cement, glass, steelmaking and petrochemical and transform it into electric energy.