Displaying items by tag: Upgrade

Taiwan: Taiwan Cement plans to spend at least US$19m on building waste gasifiers at its Ho-Ping cement plant in Hualien County. The unit will be used to burn solid municipal waste, according to the Taipei Times newspaper. The Hualien City government awarded the tender to the cement producer in May 2019. Taiwan Cement intends to build the unit by 2022 whilst it gathers the necessary operating permits. However, Taiwan Cement faced opposition at a public meeting on the project in June 2019. It defended the plans saying that its Guigang plant in Guangxi Province, China burns 0.33Mt/yr of solid waste.

Canada: Lafarge Canada has commissioned a new lower carbon fuel (LCF) system at its Richmond cement plant in British Colombia. The fuel handling and delivery system is expected to replace up to 50% of the plant’s fossil fuel use with lower carbon fuels. The project cost US$20m. Lafarge received US$10m in funding support from the British Columbia Ministry of Environment. LCF used by the plant is comprised of primarily non-recyclable waste by-products.

“Lafarge is aligned with Metro Vancouver’s sustainability goals for recovering energy from landfill-bound solid waste, a classic example of the Circular Economy in action. This new system allows us to more easily reach our target of substituting 50% of our fossil fuel use with lower carbon options. Data from our pilot suggests we can go higher—even up to 70% is realistic,” said Pascal Bouchard, the plant manager at Richmond.

The Richmond cement plant is Lafarge’s first Canadian unit that has been permitted to use lower carbon fuels for 10 years. Previous upgrades allowed the plant to achieve 25% substitution rate.

Belarus/Hungary/US: Italy’s Entsorga is working on alternative fuel projects for cement plants in the US, Belarus and Hungary. In the US it has signed a contract to supply a Pelican feed line at Argos Cement’s Martinsburg plant in West Virginia. It follows a long-term off take agreement in place with the cement producer to supply alternative fuels. The 60,000t/yr feed station is similar to a feed station already delivered in 2016 in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

In Belarus the waste engineering company plans to install an alternative fuel feed line at the Krasno cement plant. Local subsidiary EntsorgaFin will define the material acceptance standards and provide the design for the fuel feed station and feed line.

In Hungary Entsorga was awarded a contract for the supply of an alternative fuels automated handling and feeding system in January 2019 with an unnamed global cement producer. It will provide its Spider and Pelican products to the end user. Commissioning of the plant is scheduled for early 2020.

UK: Hanson’s Ribblesdale cement plant plans to upgrade its automatic feed system to increase its usage of solid recovered fuel (SRF). It is part of a three-phase fuel strategy to reduce the amount of coal the unit uses. The subsidiary of Germany’s HeidelbergCement has been using SRF since 2011.

“Successful trials have also been carried out to burn waste paper residues from motor oil filters in the kilns and use of this as an additional alternative fuel will start in 2020,” said Simon Moorhouse, Hanson Cement’s operations manager.

New Zealand: Fletcher Building has ordered a Hotdisk Combustion device from Denmark’s FLSmidth for installation at its Golden Bay Cement plant in Portland. Once the Hotdisk is operational the plant’s kiln will consume up to 3.1 million shredded tyres per year. Carsten Damslund Jensen, Global Product Line Manager at FLSmidth, said that the company is forecasting the sale of 10 Hotdisk units in 2019. Demand around the world, and especially in China, is driving the growth.

China: Guangzhou Zhujiang Cement has completed a dry sludge co-processing project at its plant in Shenxian, Baiyun in Guangdong. The plant can process 300t/day of the dry sludge. CNBM Sinoma’s subsidiary Tianjin Cement Industry Design & Research Institute (TCDRI) was the main contractor on the initiative. The project was agreed in early 2016, built in 2017 and then tested from late 2017.

Czech Republic: Lafarge Czech Republic plans to spend nearly Euro4m on upgrades for its Ciskovice plant. Half of this investment has been spent on rebuilding an electrostatic precipitator for the main chimney for the plant. An additional Euro1.5m will be spent on improvements to the warehouse, handling and dosing of alternative fuels for the kiln. Upgrades to improve the unit’s noise and fire protection are also scheduled.

Mexico: Holcim Mexico has spent US$5.5m on upgrades to allow co-processing alternative fuels at its Ramos Arizpe plant near Saltillo. The new alterntive fuels line will start operation by May 2018, according to the Vanguard newspaper. Rodolfo Montero Chacón, the general director of the subsidiary of LafargeHolcim, said that the 2.2Mt/yr plant has two kilns but it only uses one due to local demand. The plant currently operates a proudction capcity utilistation rate of 55%.

Egypt: Khaled Fahmy, the Minister of Environment, has opened a new production line at Arabian Cement Company’s Ain Sokhna plant in Suez. The line uses FLSmidth’s Hotdisc combustion device to allow it to use high levels of alternative fuels, according to the Watani newspaper. The opening was attended by Muhammad Shehab Abdel-Wahab, chief executive of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, Nahed Youssef, head of waste management organisation, as well as a number of representatives of the financiers, and director of the European Investment Bank.

In 2015 Arabian Cement Company commissioned another Hotdisc installation. At the time is said it had a designed fuel mix of 70% coal and 30% alternative fuels, using a mixture of agricultural wastes, municipal sludge, and refuse-derived fuel (RDF).

Bulgaria: Holcim Bulgaria’s Bell Ivor cement plant will increase its co-processing rate of municipal solid waste to 100,000t/yr in 2018. The plant has purchased new equipment to increase its waste processing capacity and enable it to co-process bigger municipal solid waste volumes. Geocycle Bulgaria, a waste management subsidiary of LafargeHolcim, and the cement plant source waste from a mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plant near Sofia.