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2009 was year where cement industry news was really dominated by three factors: the economy, the Chinese, and the environment. Here are some of the stories we at BGE believe were the most important of the year: It’s the economy, stupid – The economic collapse and its effect on the cement industry may have started in ernest in [...] The Financial Times reports today that the major cement manufacturers expect cement demand in Europe and The US to be 30% and 44% (respectively) lower than in 2007. A squeeze on infrastructure projects, thanks to exploding government debts and tightening of spending is primarily to blame, they said. The major producers are clearly focused on developing markets [...] BGE has been hitting the pavement hard in recent weeks serving our customers and exploring opportunities, as a result, the blog has fallen a bit too silent. We won’t let that become a habit (well, serving customers and exploring opportunities are habits we intend to keep). Nevertheless, interesting news has not rested! Through an article on tonic [...] Researchers at MIT have discovered something that has eluded science for all of history. In research funded by Portuguese cement producer Cimpor, MIT has finally modeled the crystalline structure of cement hydrate. Yes, in spite of cement being the most widely used manmade building material in the world, no one really knew how it worked, at [...] Calera is back in the news with it’s CO2 eating cement made by reacting stack emissions with a magnesium salt rich water solution. The San Francisco Chronical is reporting on his pilot plant and California and the fact that Constantz has managed to get himself invited to speak about Calera to the World of Concrete trade [...] This posting discusses corporate decision rights versus plant decision rights – where should the line be drawn? [...] Have you ever heard the expression “Life’s how it is, not how it ought to be?” An enterprise that wants to implement a standard reliability strategy across multiple sites must confront the implication of this statement. Most mining enterprises do not have cookie-cutter plants or facilities. The locations will vary in age of equipment and workers. The quality [...] Michael Mandel has an interesting article at BusinessWeek where he speculates that part of the blame for the current economic slump can be placed on a failure to innovate over the last decade. This is somewhat shocking at first, given all the hype innovation has received in the business world and the general press. On the [...] It was about a year ago that I first heard about Calera, a mysterious company that claims to be able to make cement by reacting CO2 and seawater with some “magic pixie dust” to produce a cement like material. Their claims have been widely disputed and their secretive nature has not done much to help the [...] The build-up related to another “Cooler Wars” panel discussion for this week’s IEEE Conference Participants turned out to be very anticlimactic. Following the panel discussion, nearly all of the participants polled concluded that there is very little in the way of technology that currently differentiate the major OEMs (KHD, Polysius, FLSmidth, Claudius Peters) when it comes [...] |
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