Global Cement News
Search Cement News
German investors to build cement plant in Libya 03 May 2018
Libya: German investors have met with the mayor of Al-Bayda to discuss building a cement plant in Cyrenaica. The proposed plant will have a production capacity of 4000t/day, according to the Libya Observer. The plant will be located south of Al-Bayda.
Paraguay: President Horacio Cartes has inaugurated a kiln upgrade to Industria Nacional del Cemento’s (INC) Vallemi cement plant. The project has converted the unit’s third production line to petcoke usage from fuel oil, according to La Nación newspaper. The upgrade work cost US$45m. The plant has three production lines but only one is used.
National Company Law Tribunal asks Binani Cement creditors to consider offer from UltraTech Cement 03 May 2018
India: The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has asked the Committee of Creditors (COC) of Binani Cement to consider UltraTech Cement's revised offer. It has also set 24 June 2018 as the completion deadline of the insolvency resolution process, according to the Press Trust of India. The NCLT also asked the COC to reconsider the resolution plan of Rajputana Properties if the subsidiary of Dalmia Bharat Group was willing to raise its offer over UltraTech Cement’s.
A consortium led by Dalmia Bharat won an auction for Binani Cement with a bid of US$974m in early March 2018. UltraTech Cement then made a direct bid to Binani Cement a few weeks later. However, the Supreme Court blocked UltraTech Cement’s offer in mid-April 2018. UltraTech Cement has since made a raised offer to the resolution professional handling the insolvency process of Binani Cement.
Cement highlights from the Global Slag Conference 2018
Written by David Perilli, Global Cement
02 May 2018
There is lots to mull over for the cement industry from last week’s Global Slag Conference that took place in Prague.
One striking map from Michael Connolly, TMS International, showed the status of slag and steel products in the US. It was a multi-coloured patchwork of different regulatory statuses from approval to be used as a product to regulatory exclusion. This won’t come as a surprise to many readers but even within one country the way slag can be used legally varies.
As this column reported last year after the Euroslag Conference, the European Union can be presented in a similar way. The irony here is that increased use of slag and other secondary cementitious materials (SCM) is exactly the kind of change the cement and concrete industries need to make to decrease their carbon emissions. Constant quibbles over whether slag is a product or a waste undermine this. Happily then that Connolly was able to report progress in the US as lobbying by industry and the US National Slag Association have led to more states legally accepting slag as a product.
However, cement producers have other concerns in addition to environmental ones when it comes to slag usage as Doug Haynes from Smithers Apex explained. Haynes, a former UK steel industry worker turned consultant, spoke around a market report on the future of ferrous slag. His take on Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) slag was that despite fuel savings, decreased CO2 emissions and the benefits of embodied iron when it is used as a raw material for clinker production, it is in the interests of cement producers for slag to be a waste because they then get it for free or at a reduced rate. It’s a similar story to the use of waste-derived fuels powering cement plant kilns where producers want lower fuel costs but waste collectors want value for their product. Unsurprisingly, Haynes wanted cement producers to accept the value embodied in BOF slag.
Charles Zeynel of ZAG International, an SCM trader, then laid out the situation where global SCM supplies are remaining static but cement demand is growing. Coal-fired power station closures are reducing supplies of fly ash, another SCM, placing pressure on existing granulated blast furnace slag (GBS) slag supplies. The message was very much in a slag trader’s favour but instructive nethertheless. If slag is in demand then the price will rise. Anecdotally, the increased number of cement producers at the conference seemed to indicate increased interest of the cement industry in the product.
Lots more speakers followed on topics such as slag beneficiation, grinding advances and new innovations. On grinding, one surprise that popped up was that Spain’s Cemengal has sold a Plug & Grind Vertical mill to CRH Tarmac’s cement plant at Dunbar in Scotland. It is the first such sale of this product in Europe. The last speaker, Jürgen Haunstetter of the German Aerospace Centre, stuck out particularly with his presentation on using slag as a thermal energy storage medium in a concentrated solar power (CSP) plant. This may not seem connected to the cement industry but it is along similar lines to Italcementi’s project at the Aït Baha cement plant in Morocco, which uses a CSP process that can be used with the plant’s waste heat recovery unit.
The Global Slag Conference will return in April 2019 in Aachen, Germany.
Read the full review of the 13th Global Slag Conference 2018
Amit Bhatia appointed deputy chairman of Breedon Group
Written by Global Cement staff
02 May 2018
UK: Breedon Group has appointed Amit Bhatia as its non-executive deputy chairman with immediate effect. Bhatia joined Breedon’s board as a non-executive director in August 2016, following the group’s acquisition of Hope Construction Materials. He is a director of Abicad Holding, a shareholder in Breedon, and vice chairman of Queens Park Rangers FC.