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Key developments in the Austrian cement industry: Dr Felix Papsch, Association of the Austrian Cement Industry (Austria)

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

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Yeah. Thank you very much dear ladies and gentlemen. A very nice welcome to this great city of Vienna from my side. I'd like to give you some insights in to the key developments of the Austrian cement industry. I would like to give my presentation two parts. First of all, I would like to give you some general numbers and indicators of our cement industry, and then second part, I would like to give you some examples.

Examples of innovations that are installed in specific sites of our industry. Let's have first look on our production volumes. If you figure out, you can make them back already to the year 1988. If you see the year 2009, you see you have also been hit by the crisis, and at the moment we are trying to do our best to recover the levels we had before the crisis.

On average, we produce around 4.5 million tons of cement. The number I would like to come back later on and if you could produce a little bit more three million tons of green car. Let's also look at the few areas, we use for the green product. Lets have a special look on alternative fuels and here we can see a vast increase of use of alternative fuels.

We see many colors here indicated by different fractions of alternative fuels. On the bottom you can see the use of end of live tires which already started and in the early 80's.Waste oil has come back a little but it has been replaced as solvents and you see this big yellow part here which which makes clear that almost half of the whole energy we use for clinker production comes of plastic waste.


There are many colors here. There is one thing we cannot find here, it's pet coke because in Austria, pet coke is not considered as an alternative fuel. It is considered as a conventional fuel so still without pet coke we have a very high share of alternative substitution rates here of 75%. The use of pet coke has come down already to less than 7% and the use of lignite and black coal is less than 15% now in our industry.

Some of the factors you see here come together with some organic parts which are going to help us for the initial trading scheme in terms of neutral emissions, and we'll come back to that a little bit later on. Now I just want to compare this very high number of 75% with some indicators from other countries, and those you know, are already familiar with the cement sustainability initiative, and they're getting the numbers right.

Data base is, here you can see the substitution rate in other countries. It starts with about 1% in China goes up to 12, 15% in Canada and United States and then on the far right you see most European countries which comes in hand with better developed regulation in terms of waste treatment. Austria has indeed a very good high share of 72% in the year 2013 which is four times as much as the global average, at the moment of 15% and still almost twice as much as the European average of 38% in the European Union.

Having a look at the CO2 initial factors of these fuels, we see a bandwidth here on the upper bandwidth, we see probably the most convenient fuel in the cement industry worldwide which is black coal, and here to show you the development of our entire fuel mix, which we're able to pin down the initial to 68 kg CO2 per gigajoule. So, we are already way below the average use of black coal.

If you have a special look on alternative fuels, and the biorgnic fractions to see we already hit a level of natural gas which is considered the most friendly for self use in terms of climate protection. Here we can see the development of the clinker in our cement. We already have the level below 80% in the year 1997. 2014 was really the second year where we were able to bring down the clinker content in our cements to less than 70% and also here I would like to compare this to some prognosis to international energy agency did back then in the year 2009, but it prognosis that the average clinker content in the year 2030 will be around 73% world wide and if you still consider the second number which is still 35 years away in the year 2050, you can see already today we lie lower than that prognosis with 71% for the year 2050.

Alternative is not only the word used for fuels, we also use alternative raw materials for clinker production and also here we have the best increase for alternative materials like various [xx] issues. In this case, we also use broken concrete which cannot really be used as much in other industries until you reach the level of already 14% in the year 2014.

If you go back a little bit to the year 2012, there we have a level of 12% and this is the last year but numbers are available from the assembly we're reaching. You can see the X is used starts with 50% and the it goes up to 96% for materials and then the last 4% made of minerals from fuels and alternative raw materials. So also here we are little bit ahead of the development [xx[ region.

Once we produced our clinker, we also use alternative main constituents to produce our cement. You can see in the year 2014, we already used 975,000 tons of alternative main constituents. Let me put on top of this 680,000 tons of alternative raw materials for clinker production and still as shown in this figure, almost 500,000 tons of alternative fuels, then we see that in the year 2014, we already used 2 million tons of alternative resources. And now if you remember back here from the first slide that we produced 4.5 million tons of cement and we do this, the calculation with two million tons of alternative resource is received for every ton of cement we produce.

We take almost 500 kg of alternative resources. You see, we play we put very important position in the value chain of resources because by using alternative resources and use of natural resources can be protected. That's land fuel due to alternative resources can be avoided. Let's have a closer look from the energy demand just like we have seen already before. Just we were able to bring down the energy demand specific energy demand until the level possible to do something big more anymore.

So, we started to use alternative fuels in the year 1988. As you can see here, the use of conventional fuels has come down quite in a linear manner. Also we can see a little bit in the last years, we couldn't go down with whole specific demand any more. Actually, if you have a closer look at the year 2004 and also the years before, you see that actual demands is rising also again a little bit.

One of the reasons we will find later in the presentation. There are many reasons, but one of them is the future installations we needed for emission of [xx]. They also consume a little bit of energy. In the year 2007, we wanted to know very exactly where is the last energy efficiency potential that's hidden our industry.

So, we contracted a local energy consultant and we asked for support of the German industry and they did the survey on our sites. We did more than 65 plant visits, invested more than 1000 man power hours. They were working for three years to find this little potentials left compared to the overall energy used in our industry. You can see here numbers very low, even less than 1% for electric motors, compressed air, programming electric lighting. Some potential has been found for cement grinding. Based on the results, we're able to optimize some of the mills in our industry a little bit higher.

The share comes from a district heating feet which depends on a lot of circumstances like now we need a lot of constant use, consumers in our nearby areas of the cement so that we can support them with our excessive heat. We also need a networking style to supply them with heat. So, based these results, we were also helped one plant could to another to deliver heat into the local consumers around them.

If Austria would be a green field and we would built our cement industry completely new, these are the potentials that we could gather in around 2- 6% on average. So, very close to the limits of energy efficiency in this industry. Now, we want to change a little bit to the second part of my presentation. Its come to the emission abatement in Austria. In our industry, we could see the development of our NOH emissions.

We could see back then in the year 1995, we already had a level of average mean level of less than 800 mg/m3 and we were able to support different measures to bring the level very much down as you can see in this development. In the year 2009, we did a voluntary agreement with our government to even push this level lower.

We did a conflict with economic ministry and also the environmental ministry. We said we want to keep the level in the year 2010 below a value of 405 and in the year 2012, we even want to reach a level of 395. Now looking back, you can see that both values have been achieved. The second level of 395 has already been reached in the year 2011 plus in the year 2012, we were already 14% lower than what we supported for our target.

One of this reasons is the NOx catalyst in Austria cement plant manners. Of course it was an effort of all the plants. They worked out for NOx reduction but one of the fundaments we have also was the Nox catalyst at the cement plant mannersdorf which you will also see on Wednesday. There is also a presentation of these catalyst later on so I'll just stick to this. Later here, the beginning of operation boss in April, 2012.

The catalyst itself is located in this left former preheat-er tower. You can see here, it's 25 meters high. It has 43 cubic meters of volume and 5,700 square meters of surface for reacting with the catalyst layers. After a few problems in the beginning, it was a very new technology. It was finally turned that the possibly to reach the level below 200 milligrams per cubic meters for the NOx concentrates.

An availability of more than 95% should be now realistic in long term. We also hope that the standing time for the cat layers will be longer than actually of one year because the cat layers are quite expensive to replace them. The layers cost more than 200,000 Euros so if we have to exchange them every year, it comes with a lot of money.

The project itself, it was considered to be about 12 million Euros. Because we have a pressure loss in this system, we also need an additional electric power demand of around 7.5 kilowatt hours per ton of clinker. Plus the additional operation cost are around one Euro per ton of clinker. We come to another example now of a private company.

This was the first worldwide installed system in the cement plant. The so called regenerative thermal oxideriser in the austrian cement plant wopfing. It started out its operation in the summer 2011. If you have a look at this image, you can see a little bit the kiln here. That's the preheater system and use a new backfeed that has been installed and now comes this new system with its dimensions.

It's about 10 meters wide, 26 meters long and a little bit more than 5 meters high. It's an end-of-pipe system with the size of almost 12 full sized trailer trucks. So quite a big thing here. Inside of this system, the raw gas enters this back field where the dust is taken out to a level of less than 10 milligram per cubic meter.

And then the raw dust enters this system through the honey combs. You can see here, with temperature of above 150 degrees. On up it's just the burning chamber that the raw gas is burnt at the temperature of more than 850 degrees. The energy for burning the raw gas comes from the un-burnt compound itself with the raw gas, plus a little bit of extra gas can be used to stabilize the process, but it is not really necessary because this installation can be run [xx] way and once the raw gas is cleaned, it leaves the system again back leaving the heat to this catalyst layers here and it gets out to the stack with about 200 degrees. So we can see it's a very energy efficient installation and it's efficiency is more than 95%. In the burning chamber, there are also some integrated detection [xx] of ammonia [xx] integrated SNCR.

It is possible together with the other SNCR in the preheater which we reduces [xx] already to elaborate to less than 50%, together with the second form integrated in this system, it is possible to reach a level of less than 80%. So two SNCRs, less than 80% NOx. And here's some specific data for this installation.

It was supported by incentives and therefore also some average emission values have been set. For CO, a value of 330 milligrams per cubic meter, for TOC the value was 33 milligrams per cubic meter. Actual awareness have been already achieved way lower than shown here. It has been proven the reduction of TOC and CO has been possible for more than 95%.

The operational availability is now near to 100%. Actually, the system is installed in a way that the cement process cannot run without this installation anymore. It also makes the cement production easier, because it stabilizes the process. So not so much to care about anymore. Also here we have an additional electric power demand of 8 kilowatt hours per ton of clinker due to the pressure loss of about 30 millibar. So we need stronger [xx] to compress the air pressure.

Plus, the additional cost in this system mainly come from the additional energy costs of roughly about one Euro per ton clinker. A few weeks ago, a similar system has been started in an other cement plant in Kirchdorf. We can see [xx] is located in the middle of a village which means there's very limited space for an installation to start something new but still we can see here this little gap was free to start a new so called DeCo NOx installation. So we can say there is always place for renovation even if this place is very limited and compared to the Wopfing you have seen before, the idea is that in the future, it takes notice of place within the catalyst layer. So we have also not only reduction of CO and TOC but also a catalytic reduction of NOx.

Here is some first numbers for the installations to the mentioned. It's 30 meters long, seven meters wide, 25 metres high. Also here, we have 25,000 honeycombs in five chambers with six layers each. The SCI is still planning at the moment, the system is run with family catalyst, because it has to be proven if it really works well before the [xx] catalyst are installed. The project costs somewhat around 7 million Euros.

So, after having shown the third emission abatement system, I would like to come to the last slide and talk about another emission abatement system. And here it's the case for mercury reduction, also cement plant need the stuff. This is a pilot operation. I have seen you also have special presentation on this topic later on today.

The pilot operation started in April,2014 and it runs for two years, planned until April 2016. This development is supported by the Austrian university the [xx] University of [xx]. The basic idea is that the dust from the main filter where the [xx] is placed into separated pre heater system. You can see here in the middle. So, on the right you have to sketch. On the left, we have their wall are coming down from the last cyclone. This is the new system here, the pipe which we can see here its a separate to pre heater system where the dust from the main field base added together with the help from the last rich in cyclone. So, the natural is evaporated from the dust, the dust is returned out of the system not to be free. In the hot air, active carbon is introduced. The system is cooled down afterwards so that the mercury can absorb in the activated carbon and later on the activated carbon is put out of the system beyond separated precipitator. You will see how much initial abatement we can achieve with this. If it is 50% 60% or even above to 80%, we will see what it has to people.

The project costs around 3 million Euros and plus every year, you need about 25 tons of activated lignite. So, I hope I could have given you an overall inside of our cement industry as well as the branch values but also some examples of our specific industry, and I wish you a good day, also here in the exhibition.

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