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HeidelbergCement’s endeavours in AFR and carbon capture and utilisation: Jan Theulen, Global Director Alternative Resources, HeidelbergCement (Belgium)

Filmed at Cemtech Europe 2015, 20-23 September, Intercontinental Hotel, Vienna, Austria.

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Thank you. I would like to take you a little bit around the world of HeidelbergCement. We've got a fantastic presentation of the alternative fuel development in Austria, but I can tell you if you go around the world not everywhere you have the same favorable conditions and we'll see how this works out. So it is really time to act on our CO2 footprints, if we see that in the last 150 years we spent this amount of CO2 as humanity brought into the air and in the last 15 years we added another 440 which is roughly half of what we did in the last 150 years.

If we look what it means in global warming, in 150 years we've warmed up 0.8 degrees, in the last 15 years, we moved up to 1.5 and to which the maximum, what we want to have achieved at which will be confirmed in Paris in December is do not go higher than plus two degrees, for that our remaining budget is roughly twice the volume of what we did the last 15 years, but we are increasing in a lot of countries in the world, our economy is still increasing, so if you calculate we have another 17 years left before we reach to critical point of two degrees increase, so there's nothing anymore to find excuses, this is what we have now time to act and we want to leave this result to last attempt and exploit it in order not to warm up our climate too much. And the cement industry has a large responsibility to take there, and this is very well recognized by the CSI.

The CSI is the Cement Sustainability Initiative under the world business council of sustainable developments. Our group is one of the founding members, but meanwhile we are with 22 members very well distributed around the world. And the CSI developed the road map how to come to a significant CO2 emission reduction in 2050, taking into account even the growth of the industry, and I want to highlight today two of the four important levers to reduce the CO2 is the alternative fuels and it's the carbon capture and storage and utilization.

First on alternative fuels are raw materials. If we look we have as HeidelbergCement an impressive growth of alternative fuels, but there is still a lot to develop, you can see this here graph of our cement kilns and this the alternative fuel rates. You see it ranges up from 80% but the whole of our kilns are still below 10% or even at 0%.

Of course, they are not in as favor remark as in Austria or in Germany. The challenges to move to move also the kilns with lower substitution rates in countries which are less favorable conditions to boost them up to higher use of alternative fuels of course at an economical way. Because we are not a charity organization.

We are in a highly competitive environment. But we see in general that if you raise the alternative fuel rates, your fuel cost will come down. Our top performing, some of them with 80% have a certain fuel rate, some over 60% have even lower fuel costs. It depends of course on your fuel mix, but we see a clear trend that with high alternative fuel rates you are bringing your fuel costs down.

And in the meanwhile it means we are recovering six million tons of waste per year in our group, in our cement kiln lines, saving 1.5 million tons of coal every year and it's close to $1 million CO2 saving. Let's move a little bit around the world. Let's start in China. China, of course, a massive cement industry there.

We are a tiny player in China as HeidelbergCement yet we are moving ahead, already in early stages we started to test sewage sludge because the waste water people place in China, they have huge disposal problem of their sewage sludge. So we started manual tasks, looked at reference visits, how to dry material, put the carpets in place to put a large scale sewage sludge drier unit using the exhaust gas from our kilns.

Put it into opening ceremony it was one of the first times that the opening ceremony in China was doing [xx] because I don't know if you've been in China, but it's always wet if you have an opening ceremony, this time it was in full green, and we put it into operation and we did the knowledge change in one of the conferences of the CSI were done in China, we invited all our colleagues of the industry to come to learn from this example.

Where are we now? We're a few years later, we've had a lot of trouble with our first plant, but it's that successful that the Grand Human Zapelati[sp?] is urging us now to increase the capacity and to take more of their sewage sludge because they are expanding the water equipment and they need to have it taken care of in a proper way. Going to Africa, to Togo. In Togo we have just commissioned, last year, a 5000 dump a day of kiln line and even before we commissioned this line, we have started to investigate the waste market in Togo.

In Lome there is a landfill of 120, 000 tones per year municipal waste and it's a bit managed in a different way than in Europe I can tell you and that nonetheless we started our investigation to sample the wastes, to find out what is exactly in this landfill. Screened out the waste, separated in several boxes, ten categories of waste we've identified, measured them whole and finally reported that so that we know what is the colloid value of the waste.

With this in hand, we saw a feasibility coming, the EU is willing to spend money to develop a proper landfill in Togo and we said why to put all the waste in a landfill if you can also recycle it to RDF? So that's where we are. We have educated the the local governments what it is to turn waste into an alternative fuel and meanwhile in the tender which they gave out they've prescribed that RDF, the preparation can be one of the options of the providers for the new landfill.

So of course if you know about the waste you can calculate your opex, you calculate your capex and you can see if you can run a feasible project, and that exactly where we are today. Lets move to Indonesia. In Indonesia our plant is very close, one of our biggest plants is very close to Jakarta. Well Jakarta is a huge metropol, here you see the population density here, and our plant is right located here at the edge of the ever growing city.

You can see that when you look at future Jakarta will becomes the biggest city of Asia, Oceania outside China. That's one thing but more important and more remarkable is that the GDP growth of Jakarta which is now 11th on the list, it will jump up to the number of three in GDP. So after Tokyo and Lusaka, Jakarta will be the biggest GDP generating metropol in Asia, Oceania outside China.

As we know the more wealthy we are the more waste we generate. As a result we are projecting this waste development, already today, Jakarta is generating 12, 000 tonnes a day of municipal solid waste which 100% is landfill. So this will grow over the next years considerably and not only the waste volume is growing if people are more wealthy, they do not eat more watermelons but they are going more often to the McDonald's so the waste is getting richer in heat value and due to hat we know the heat value of the waste in Jakarta, will go up considerably.

Our plant, next to Jakarta with 8 kiln lines, which is now to the emission of 10, 000 dump a day kiln line, if we take 40% of that waste, 40% of all coal substituted by the waste, we need only a market share of only 25%. So we are targeting for 25% market share of the municipal solid waste in Jakarta to feed our kilns long-term.

To establish that, we have started to build a small pilot plant, to treat the waste which is very high in organics, there is no separation of wastes, so your waste is more moisture than solids. We have both the pilot plant, started the drying of the waste and have seen, and have convinced municipalities but also our own employees that you can make a very good alternative fuel even out of waste which has 60% moisture.

And with that, we are now preparing for our jump to a larger scale and there is a project in the region where a new landfill is to be constructed for 1500 tonnes per day, and actually the land filling area will be very limited because the majority of the area will be for the treatment of the waste, and after treatment only 10% will still be landfills.

You can imagine that this has a huge impact on Jakarta. if you see how fast Jakarta is growing if we would treat all the waste of Jakarta we could save 40 hectares of lands for Jakarta every year and all its essential building sector is eagerly looking for this land so its a nice business model. Then back to Europe especially a deep dive into Germany, well in general in Europe several of our Kilns are growing above to 80% substitutional grades, and this causes new challenges.

A bit different from the situation in Jakarta. So what is the challenge? We have checked and in some places we apply oxygen enrichments, on the burner to compensate for the lower burning performance of the alternative fuels, whether it's economical we apply it's monitored closely if it makes sense. Also in our calcinal section it's very important to really feed it on the eclerets[sp?] position and as we cannot test all of them we're making CAD calculations to prove and to find out where you should feed, how it will change with small adaptations the calciner to have an optimal burn out and a maximum substitution rate.

Also we have found out that if you're milling or making your alternative fuel even finer it's a challenge in itself. We've mastered the fine milling of sewage sludge, I think we are the only plant worldwide who are drying is the sewage sludge, it was a hard way, you can see here as a vertical grinding balls, but we have some fractures as well, now we know how to handle it.

So we learned from our failures and wanted the next development, this fine milling of RDF in our German Burglengenfeld plant. Why is this? If you are burning a lot of alternative fuel on the main burner, you have to risk that your flame is getting longer also probably less stable hence you get some fall out of particles out of the flame into your clinker batch which can infect your clinker quality.

So at a certain time you are reaching the limit of your attempted fuel use. Well what we have done there we have put a grinding section, a fine milling section to fine mill the plastics to a very low degree and we have got significant results, we've got a clear jump in alternative fuel rates and our clinker quality has been upgraded significantly.

Okay, that's about alternative fuel level, that's more or less, let me say proven technology, we can apply it everywhere, it's still a hard way to get it done everywhere don't underestimate that, but we know exactly what we're doing. The other lever I would like to spend the rest of my presentation on is on carbon capture and storage and utilization. That's rather new for our sector and there is long long way to go but if we don't start climbing the hill we will never get there so that's clear and our group has a big advantage but we are in Norway. Our operations in Norway, the Norwegian government is very much for our environment for our environment improvement, it's already half funded to a larger tent, the budget for the first large scale industrial turban carbon capture pilot in cement industry and it's done by Norcem, our Norwegian cement operations HeidelbergCement and Aker, I'll come back to Aker later on, the government and we are testing for technologies on the carbon capture you're warmly invited to go to the website, we had a very nice conference in May and all the publications are there.

You can get informed to a very high level of detail. Why modern Europe, what's behind it? Modern Europe has a very clear vision. Our operations in Modern Europe are striving for zero CO2 on 2030, and this is very conditional, if the government will support programs. We can not do this and make the price of cement 30 euro higher, unless import taxes are being and so it's a delicate weather but we are aiming, with help of the government, to reach zero CO2contribution over the lifetime of cement in 2030 and you see the carbon capture, the storage is a very important part of that, which is still to be established.

Again it's not something which the cement industry can do by themselves, these were some of the speakers in this conference, you see the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy himself was present showing the vision of the Norwegian Government and we need not only to capture it but we need to transport it and we need to store it.

For that we have experienced companies like Yara and Statoil on this conference and also the opinion of NGOs is very important to take into consideration if you go this road. Second I would like to highlight the European Cement Research Academy, ECRA, it has a large number of members, and it's clear that with the Oxyfuel project, ECRA is pushing further improvements.

I didn't want to go into the details of the Oxyfuel, but I want to say that one part of it is called samkap. It has achieved, a nine million Euro funding from the EU to develop some components of an Oxyfuel kiln. An Oxyfuel Kiln is going to recycle the exhaust gas in order to enrich the CO2 in this stark, and you need a special cooler for that, a pilot cooler will be build in our German plants in Heidelberg, in Hanover, in Hanover from our group. Same turf is working on an optimized burner, an industrimenti[sp?] rapid prototype of a calciner which is suitable all our particle elements of a total adapted Oxyfuel. So second important farming which we are under process to finalize.

That's a 12 million euro funding for a new type of calciner. This calciner is not like normal calciner that the exhaust gases are in contact with limestone and this time the heat is at a outer shell and then at the inner shell the limestone is present so the exhaust gases are not in direct contact with your limestone.

That means of you release the CO2 from decarbonization you can capture it or you can separate it, you need to capture it, you can separate it, with a 99% pure CO2. Of course this demands a huge heat exchange area and this pipe here must equal 1, 000 degree which is a big challenge and that is why we need funding to get it done. We are with a strong group to make it happen, we have the Cemex is an old enough technology they have this facility up and running in Australia for magnesium oxide, but magnesium oxide doesn't need that high temperatures as cement and lime.

So we have to make a big step to cement the lime application. It's a very nice challenge we will be busy with that the next five years for sure. But if we don't have all the CO2 captured, in many countries we are not able yet to store it. The public opinion is not yet ready for it, so we try to bridge that and one of the developments is we have started an algae test in Sweden in Degerhamn together with the university, and we have noticed that the algae do like a lot the exhaust gas.

Because what we see maybe as pollutants in the exhaust gas, they see as nutrition so they like our exhaust gas above, let me say, a flue gas which has only CO2 and with that we can generate, even in the climate of Sweden, to a reasonable extent algae and the Swedish fish farming industry and the poultry, they are looking for local produced nutrition materials and we are teaming up with them not only to produce algae but to apply them for large scale applications.

Another example, and that's more for the solar intensive areas, is our investigation with Jewel Technology. It's a US based company and they use the exhaust gas as it is to put it as a nutrition to modify bacteria. So the bacteria are trained to a convert solar energy and CO2 into Ethanol in a direct step and this Ethanol is an excellent fuel for cars and there's a wide interest from commodity multinationals to team up with Jewel and I would like to show you a short movie if that's technically possible. All this is happening in Texas so its a pilot plan in Texas and it shows how this conversion is taking place. Our sun springs plant is the first of its kind the first of hundreds that will produce fuels directly from sunlight and carbon dioxide. Using the same principle of photo synthesis thats sustain all plant life on earth, here we demonstrate how it works today this is where the process begins. A liquid neon is prepared containing jewels engineered microbes and non portable water. This microbe has been optimized to produce ethanol and through fits of genome engineering, Jewel has also optimized others to produce diesel, gasoline or jet fuel.

The medium is transferred to the solar fuel, comprised of modular circulation units. Her, the microbes reach just the right density, at which point they are ready for fuel production. Carbon dioxide is delivered to the circulation unit. It keeps the microbes in motion, maximizing their exposure to sunlight to drive photosynthesis, but instead of using the CO2 for growth, the microbes now use it to make fuel, in this case ethanol.

As the medium circulates, ethanol is continuously produced, separated and transferred to storage and ultimately sent off for distribution via today's standard infrastructure with no down stream processing required. The simple single step process continues for many weeks at a time. But waste of less than an acre will work identically at 1, 000 acres or more.

So it goes a bit on and on with
this American voice making a lot of advertisement, but we see it happening, we have secured and to now $150 million funding and are quite sure this will deliver but it is not applicable everywhere, you need a lot of space, and you need water, you need solar radiation so it is not one solution which held us forward. We think as HeidelbergCement, we need a whole range of a solutions to cover our ambitions.

So that comes to my concluding remarks, clearly the cement industry has set ambitions goals in a road map but you cannot write a nice road map and then start to report that you won't meet the targets and write a new road map, we rather do something. And we take action and responsibility on AFR. We master this in Europe, but we have to apply it more worldwide, but find local solutions which adapt to the local economy, it's a very nice challenge.

Then the carbon capture process, it requires intensive collaboration as we do in Aker. This is not one company can solve by itself and we are just demonstrating our leadership that we are prepared to work on that domain, and also on the use of CO2, I have shown you two examples how we test it, but we have another eight projects in development and all of them will deliver in future we hope.

So thank you for your attention.

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