US: Canada’s McInnis Cement has officially opened its terminal in the Bronx, New York. The terminal can store up to 44,000t of cement and most of this will be delivered by ship. City Council Member and Land Use Committee Chair Rafael Salamanca, Bronx Community Board 2 Chair, Bobby Crespo and members of several Bronx organisations and the local business community joined McInnis Cement executives to celebrate the opening of the unit, the first new industrial maritime project built on the South Bronx waterfront in more than half a century.

Spain: Demand for cement in Spain in the first half of 2018 was 8% higher than in the first half of 2017, according to the national cement association Oficemen. The rate of growth was down, however. The country recorded an 11% year-on-year increase in demand between the first half of 2016 and the first half of 2017. Oficemen had expected demand to pick up by 12% for the whole of 2018 but now expects an increase of 7% instead. If realised, this would mean sales of around 13.3Mt for 2018.

“At the beginning of the year, the Department of Studies of Oficemen expected to close 2018 with a 12% increase in domestic demand. Now, with public works almost paralysed, we are talking about lowering our forecasts by 5 percentage points,” explained the president of Oficemen, Jesús Ortiz. “The weak recovery of the construction that began in Spain in 2017 depends on the building sector. Although it is growing at a good pace, it does so from absolute values that are still very low.” It is estimated that 2018 will close with around 100,000 new homes started, a figure that, while ignoring the years of the construction boom, represents less than half of the average of the homes that were built in Spain in the period 1970-1995.

“Public investment in Spain remains at 63% of the average investment of Germany, the UK, France and Italy, which takes us dangerously away from our neighbours. There is a consequent loss of competitiveness for our country, especially in the most exposed sectors: exports, tourism, treatment and prevention of environmental risks, driver safety, and so on,“ added Ortiz.

Cement exports were also down year-on-year, for the 13th month in a row. Ortiz primarily blamed this on the devaluation of the Turkish Lira, which has helped Turkish cement exports advance their competitiveness compared to Spain. He also highlighted rising electricity costs, which are expected to be 20% higher at the end of 2018 than at the start. This will make electricity 28% more expensive than for German cement producers, according to Ortiz. “What has recovered in the domestic market in these two years, is being lost abroad, with production that remains stagnant at 20Mt since 2013, a figure that accounts for half of the installed capacity of our factories. Therefore, the uncertainty and concern for our industry is maintained,” concluded Ortiz.

Netherlands: Van Aalst says that NACC Alicudi is the world’s first cement carrier equipped with International Maritime Organization (IMO) Tier III compliant diesel engines driving the bulk handling system. Converted in 2017 with a Van Aalst dry bulk handling system, the vessel became a 120m self-discharging cement carrier, with a cement handling system based on compressors and vacuum pumps, driven by Tier III Scania engines. This has created a ‘unique’ vacuum-pressure system for pneumatic conveyance of cement, fly ash and granulated slag.

Directly after completion of the conversion, the NACC Alicudi entered the trade for a three-year contract on the east coast of the US and Canada, an area that has been a NOx Emission Control Area (ECA) for new built and converted vessels since January 2016. Van Aalst says that this approach fits well with the environmental policies of both NovaAlgoma Cement Carriers and McInnis Cement. The high emission standards of the vessel will enable a shift to the US Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

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.

Pakistan: Mohammad Amin Dadabhoy, the chief executive of Dadabhoy Cement Industries, has died. The company operates an integrated plant at Nooribad in the Dadu District of Sindh.

India: Shree Cement has ordered a TRT 5000/8.0 Triplex dryer from Germany’s Gebr. Pfeiffer. The dryer will be used to dry flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) gypsum from a captive coal-power plant for use in cement plants. In the planned dryer plant the moisture of the FGD gypsum will be reduced to a residual moisture of <2%. Artificial gypsum from the dryer will be used at other cement grinding plants in the country. The 50t/hr dryer will be installed at the end of 2018 and is expected to start commercial operation in mid-2019.

Gebr. Pfeiffer is also planning to partially calcine the gypsum in future installations of the dryer. The TRT Triplex dryer uses the uniflow principle, where both material and hot gasses flow in the same direction and pass through the dryer tubes from the centre outwards. Testing at the Gebr. Pfeiffer test station have yielded ‘positive’ results and further installations in other plants are being considered.

India: NCL Industries’ cement production rose by 36% year-on-year to 1.02Mt in the half year to the end of September 2018 from 0.75Mt in the same period in 2017. Its cement despatches increased by a similar amount to 1.02Mt from 0.75Mt. The company operates in cement, cement-based boards, ready-mixed concrete, prefabricated structures and hydroelectric power.

UK: Sweden’s LKAB Minerals has signed a deal to buy Francis Flower. The acquisition is intended to bring a portfolio of sustainable products into LKAB Minerals’ portfolio. Implementation of the agreement is subject to Austrian merger clearance. Both parties are confident that the merger control process will be completed by the end of November 2018. No value for the agreement has been disclosed.

Francis Flower is a family owned business, and the main shareholder is the current chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), Adrian Willmott, who upon completion of the sale will resign his position in the business but remain available in a consultancy capacity during an integration phase. The company will be integrated into LKAB Minerals’ existing UK business under the leadership of Darren Wilson, who manages the UK and European business within LKAB Minerals.

Francis Flower recycles blast furnace slag from the steel industry for production of ground granulated blast furnace slag for use in cement production, among other offerings for industrial and agricultural use. It employs 130 people across four sites in the UK: Scunthorpe, Wicken, Gurney Slade and Runcorn.

LKAB Minerals in the UK has a similar size business across four sites and employs around 160 people. Its main operations are processing and marketing of minerals, primarily for the building, construction, polymer, coating, refractory and foundry industries.

“We have an ambition of growing the industrial minerals business significantly over time, to balance LKAB’s growing iron ore production,” said Leif Boström, Senior Vice President for the Special Products Division in LKAB and CEO of LKAB Minerals group. “This will strengthen LKAB Minerals’ offering to the building and construction industries.”

Brazil: Walter Dissinger, the chief executive officer of Votorantim Cimentos, says that company’s diverse geographical spread and its products protected it from turbulent markets, especially at home in Brazil since 2015. Dissinger made the comments in an interview to the Valor Econômico newspaper ahead of a company meeting to plan its strategy for the next five years. He forecast that the local cement market is likely to decline for the fourth consecutive year in 2018, with a drop in consumption of 2%.

He mentioned expansion plans in the US and upgrade projects in Argentina. Six new mortar plants are also planned over the next four years with an investment of US$30m. These units will generally be built next to existing integrated cement plants. The company is expanding its limestone business with an investment of US$54m. Dissinger added that the company’s Nobres plant in Mato Grosso is making more revenue from limestone products than from cement. The company is also cutting fuel costs by replacing petcoke imports from the US with co-processing refuse derived fuels and exploring biofuel options.

Russia: Filaret Galchev, the chairman of Eurocement, and Vladimir Sushkov, the chairman of the government of the Republic of Mordovia, has officially opened a Euro65m grinding unit at the Mordovcement plant. The new grinding unit includes two ball mills with a production capacity of 2.6Mt/yr, a 50,000t clinker warehouse and rail and truck despatch silos. Eurocement used equipment from Christian Pfeiffer, Claudius Peters, Aumund and KHD for the upgrade project at its subsidiary.