South Florida construction companies and developers are counting on the opening of Titan America’s mammoth new plant to catch supply up to demand for cement. The US$220m plant will be able to churn out 1.8Mta of cement, making it the larger of two cement plants in South Florida. Rinker Materials owns the other, which generates about half that tonnage.
South Florida’s building boom, paired with a shortage of ships to carry cement to the region, has created a concrete bottleneck, driving up prices as much as 10 per cent and slowing down delivery schedules.
Since the kiln start-up on June 1, Titan’s cement plant in western Miami-Dade County has been churning out 2000 to 3000 tpd of cement. Its full production capacity is 5000t, which is about double that of its former plant, built four decades ago. But it may take several more months to work out the technical bugs of the new state-of-the-art plant before it hits full stride, said Fokion Tasoulas, the plant’s VP of operations. Tasoulas, a mining engineer, was transferred from parent Titan Cement Co.’s headquarters in Athens, Greece, to roll out the new Miami-Dade plant, the most expensive ever built by the publicly held global company.
