Displaying items by tag: lime

Bolivia: Itacamba Cementos has appointed Marcelo Morales as its general manager.

Morales previously worked as the chief financial officer and head of procurement for the cement producer since 2015. Before this he held a variety of roles in Brazil for Votorantim Cimentos including finance, strategy and marketing roles. He was also the head of the company’s lime business for a period. Morales holds a qualification in business administration and a master’s degree in business administration.

Belgium: The EU Innovation Fund has awarded Euro4.5m to a consortium consisting of Lhoist, gas provider Fluxys Belgium, concrete products company Prefer and carbonation technology developer Orbix. The collaborators are working on a project called CO2ncrEAT. The project will carbonate steel sector by-products with captured CO₂ from Lhoist's Hermalle lime plant to produce alternative building materials. CO2ncrEAT will be the first project to employ Orbix's innovative technique for the purpose. Fluxys Belgium's pipeline technology will convey the Hermalle plant's emissions over a distance of 2km to a Prefer concrete blocks plant.

The consortium said that it will use 12,000t/yr of CO₂ to produce 100,000t/yr of reduced-CO₂ concrete blocks. The use of alternative raw materials in the blocks will further reduce their carbon footprint by 8000t/yr.

Lhoist Western Europe managing director Vincent Deleers said “The project fits perfectly with our willingness to actively develop CO₂ capture and sequestration technologies that are essential to the sustainability of our industry. We are delighted that our work on innovative solutions has been recognised by the European Innovation Fund and we look forward to working with our partners to bring CO2ncrEAT to the next level.”

China: Jinzhou Tiansheng Heavy Industry has ordered a lime plant with a production capacity of just under 5000t/day from Switzerland-based Maerz Ofenbau. The order includes six PFR-type kilns and will be based at a carbide plant that is being built by Mundra Petrochem, a subsidiary of India-based Adani Group. Maerz says that the new plant will be the largest lime unit ever built at a new site. The equipment manufacturer will supply engineering, material and equipment for the R5S carbide-gas-fired kilns, each with a production capacity of 800t/day.

Scandinavia: Norway-based Aqualung Carbon Capture has secured a contract to supply a membrane-based carbon capture and storage (CCS) system for a Nordkalk lime plant in Scandinavia. The supplier said that each Aqualung Carbon Capture unit has the capture capacity to remove 25% of an average Nordkalk lime kiln's CO₂ emissions. The project will commence in early 2023.

Nordkalk plans to roll out Aqualung Carbon Capture CCS systems across all of its kilns before 2030. Accordingly, parent company SigmaRoc has newly committed to tightened group CO₂ reduction targets under the guidance of the Science-Based Target Initiative (SBTi).

SigmaRoc CEO Max Vermorken said “Our partnership with Aqualung is an exciting next step for the group and the fruit of many months of diligent work by Aqualung and our technical teams in the UK and at Nordkalk. It demonstrates that capturing all process emissions is possible, with existing technology and at industrial scale. Once we roll this out across the group, I believe we will be industry-leading when it comes to our carbon capture strategy, demonstrating again the agility of our business and our business model.”

Aqualung Carbon Capture president and chief technical officer Henrik Utvik said “Aqualung Carbon Capture is extremely pleased to partner with a pioneering company like SigmaRoc to apply our decarbonisation concept in lime production. Due to the size and energy advantages, we believe our technology is ideally suited for this application, and the collaboration with SigmaRoc will fast-track the deployment of full-scale carbon capture installations.”

UK: The Mineral Products Association (MPA) has appointed Jon Flitney, Michael Conroy, Liam Forde, Steve Callow and Mike Haynes to new roles at the organisation. This follows the appointment of Jon Prichard as the MPA’s chief executive officer in October 2022, succeeding Nigel Jackson.

Jon Flitney has joined MPA Cement as Energy and Climate Change Manager. He will be working with the MPA Cement Climate Change and CO2 Reduction group providing support to sector decarbonisation and associated policies. Flitney joins from the British Ceramic Confederation (BCC) where he has worked across energy, environment, climate change and decarbonisation policy areas for over six years. He also previously worked on air quality and environmental protection for local authorities and the Environment Agency, covering a variety of manufacturing industries.

Michael Conroy joins as Manager - Environment, Safety & Regulatory Affairs for MPA Cement. He has over 20 years’ experience in the mineral products industry and ,since 2016, this has been focussed on environmental management, compliance, permitting and regulation across various sectors within the industry. His role at MPA involves working with members in the cement sector and liaising with the environmental regulators and relevant government departments on behalf of the members to ensure the sector is recognised in a positive and beneficial way. He is secretariat for the Cement Regulatory Interface Group (RIG), which meets regularly to discuss environmental regulatory matters that affect and impact the UK cement sector.

Liam Forde has joined BRMCA/MPA Ready-mixed Concrete as Construction Manager. His main responsibilities will be working with MPA members, the Concrete Centre and UK Concrete to promote safety, best practice, and ready-mixed concrete as the best solution for sustainable and resilient construction. Forde is a chartered civil engineer and joins from BAM Nuttall having had a background in both design and site environments.

Steve Callow has joined as Manager, Masonry and Concrete Products. He joins from Marshalls where he was Specification Manager. He also has sector experience gained from roles in FP McCann, CPM, Milbury Systems and Carillion.
Mike Haynes has joined MPA as British Lime Association Director. He joins MPA after 18 years in the lime industry working in the sales and customer services teams responsible for Construction and Civil Engineering markets and progressing to managing the customer services team. Prior to this, Haynes worked for contractors and consultants in those markets, as an engineer and project manager.

Peru: Grupo Gloria subsidiary Yura says that it is contemplating a cement production capacity expansion. The producer says that process optimisation across its Arequipa and Southern Peruvian cement footprint might go some way towards achieving the envisioned growth. It added that any such projects would go hand in hand with a reform of its customer service practices. Yura is also evaluating possible new limestone mining projects at Pampas del Pongo and Zafranal, and an expansion of its lime production.

DF Sud News has reported that Yura expects to increase its Peruvian cement deliveries by 8 – 10% year-on-year in 2022. Its cement, concrete and lime director for Peru, Chile and Bolivia, Julio Cáceres, forecasts that Peru’s construction demand will continue to grow at twice the rate of gross domestic product. He acknowledged that the company’s 2023 results will likely reflect the country’s expected muted growth compared to 2022. Cáceres said that US$700m-worth of private investment across 30 residential projects in Arequipa is currently suspended, pending the publication of the city’s revised metropolitan development plan.

Denmark: Lime and chalk producer Dankalk has ordered a three-tube dryer type TRT 3150/5,0 from Germany-based Gebr. Pfeiffer. The order replaces a previous dryer also supplied by Gebr. Pfeiffer. Dankalk manufactures lime products for agricultural purposes, products for waste incineration plants and chemical auxiliaries and polymers for industrial wastewater treatment and environmental processes.

UK: US-based Mississippi Lime Company (MLC) has completed its acquisition of Singleton Birch, a supplier of lime products. The move is part of MLC’s strategy to expand both geographically and with new products and technologies. No value for the transaction has been disclosed.

Singleton Birch is based in North Lincolnshire, where it employs more than 150 staff. It will continue to operate under its existing brand and the management team, led by chief executive officer Richard Stansfield, who will remain in place. Singleton Birch has a number of business lines, including a chemicals division, which provides specialty calcium products to the rubber and plastics markets. It also provides services and solutions to the renewable energy, water treatment and waste management industries.

UK: Tarmac has successfully produced lime at its Tunstead, Derbyshire, plant using net zero hydrogen to fuel its kiln. The achievement was the culmination of a series of trials substituting various proportions of hydrogen for natural gas.

Tarmac’s lime director Graham Cooper said “Lime has been manufactured in the Peak District for centuries and this forward-thinking project aims to ensure the future of this nationally significant industry as the UK transitions to net zero.”

Boral admitted this week that high energy costs in Australia had forced it to reduce production levels. Chief executive officer Zlatko Todorcevski revealed to Reuters that the company was temporarily cutting back some unspecified areas of its operations. He also said that it was going to have to pass on growing energy prices directly on its customers.

This has followed mounting alarm at fuel prices in successive financial reports by the building materials company leading to revised earnings guidance being issued in May 2022. Bad weather was responsible for the larger share of the expected additional adverse impact to underlying earnings in its 2022 financial year but around US$10m was anticipated from rising fuel prices. Growing coal and electricity prices were said to be impacting its production and logistics costs, with price rises in January and February 2022 having proved insufficient to keep up with inflation. In a trading update in March 2022 the company said that its exposure to coal prices was unhedged for the second half of its 2022 financial year, to June 2022.

An energy crisis in Australia may seem hard to understand given that the country is one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal and gas. Yet, the country has faced a number of problems with its electricity generation sector in 2022 with disruptions to coal supplies to power stations, outages, ongoing maintenance and a cold winter that adversely affected the market. This led the Australian Energy Market Operator to suspend the country’s main wholesale market on 15 June 2022 in an attempt to stabilise the supply of electricity. New South Wales has also reportedly forced coal mines to prioritise the local market over exports. Energy minister Chris Bowen even asked the residents of New South Wales to try and reduce electricity use in the evenings in an attempt to prevent blackouts. However, with the consumer electricity market now looking more stable, attention has turned to industrial users such as Boral.

Global Cement Weekly has covered energy costs for cement producers a couple of times in the last year. There has been plenty of angst about growing energy costs on cement company balance sheets since mid-2021 as the logistics problems following the lifting of the coronavirus-lockdowns became clear. The biggest story at this time was an energy crisis in China that caused supplies to be rationed to industrial users. This then intensified with the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 and energy prices went up everywhere as economic sanctions were imposed upon Russia. One standout was Turkey where cement producers publicly raised the alarm about jumps in coal prices.

Recently, some North American lime producers such as Lhoist North America and the Mississippi Lime Company have been notably bold in announcing price rises due to energy costs and other factors. This week, for example, Lhoist North America said it had raised the price of its lime products by up to 45%. It cited the ‘challenging circumstance’ for all parties at an ‘unprecedented’ time. One alternative to the direct approach of simply putting up prices has been the use of energy surcharges. Japan-based Taiheiyo Cement announced earlier in June 2022 that it was going to introduce a coal surcharge for its cementitious products in September 2022 due to rising energy prices. Its system is based on the coal price with revisions planned every two months. The scheme will run for one year in the first instance. How customers will react to this remains to be seen.

We have looked above at a few disparate examples of the problems that energy costs have been causing cement and lime producers over the last month. These issues look set to continue in an acute phase while the war in Ukraine rages on, but the longer term trends from the economic recovery from coronavirus will undoubtedly last for longer. As examples in Australia and China have shown, local energy crises can easily spill over into the industrial sector as domestic users are prioritised. So, even if cement companies source their supplies carefully, they may face issues if the wider market struggles. Meanwhile, cement producers face the dilemma of justifying price rises to customers adapting to mounting inflation. Taiheiyo Cement has shown one way of doing this. The problems caused by surging energy prices to other cement companies look set to become more apparent in the next few months as reporting of the first half of the year emerges.