The current issue covers the 80 acquisitions by Ametek and provides an analysis of Magnetrol. This acquisition gives Ametek leadership in a number of market niches. These are summarized in the June issue. There are links to previous issues analyzing Magnetrol marketing strategy including advertising expenditure in certain magazines with comparison to Ametek

The older acquisition articles are important. 

The newsletter covered the initial public offering for Environnment SA in 2007 and its acquisition by Carlyle in 2020. Typically, financial information becomes scarce when a private equity firm makes an acquisition. So, information from previous acquisition transactions becomes important.

ISEO, Becker/Amesa, Altech, PCME, and TDL have all been acquired in the 2007-2020 period. The newsletter has close to 100 articles on these ENVEA subsidiaries at the time they were acquired. These shed light on acquisitions.

The various components of the IIoT & Remote O&M World Markets combine to provide the supplier with quantification of the market niches, competition, acquisitions, and technology. This comprises a continually updated internet of wisdom to help suppliers maximize profits in this dynamic market.

Details on ordering the report are found at http://home.mcilvainecompany.com/index.php/markets/air/n031-industrial-iot-and-remote-o-m

Bob McIlvaine can answer your questions at rmcilvaine@mcilvainecompany.com 

cell: 847 226 2391.

Hefei Second Electric Selects Longking for Wastewater Treatment System

In order to save water resources, reduce the pollution caused by wastewater discharge, and meet the discharge standards of various pollutants, Hefei Second Electric took precautions and arranged advanced treatment and recycling of circulating sewage in advance. After learning the project information, Longking began to pay attention to the project in 2020, set up a project promotion team to conduct in-depth on-site surveys, and held multiple rounds of technical solution optimization discussions to solve the pain and difficulty of circulating sewage. Later, due to the owner's equity change and other reasons, the project was postponed many times. The authorities insisted that Qingshan would not relax. Longking  continued to maintain effective communication, and finally won the support and trust of the owner, and successfully signed the project contract.

After the project is completed, it can reduce the water consumption and wastewater discharge of the power plant, improve the utilization rate of water resources, realize the resource utilization of waste water, and achieve the goals of water saving, carbon reduction and efficiency improvement.

Cement Plant NO_x Control Decisions Involve a Number of Variables and Options

Most cement plants around the world are required to make NO_x reductions. SNCR is less efficient than SCR and also adds the potential for ammonia emissions. However it involves less capital and a and operating cost.

In China SCR is increasingly applied to cement plants. In the U.S. and Europe SNCR is still popular.

One of the challenges is that cement dust can plug the catalyst. One option is to place the SCR downstream. But this requires gas reheat which is expensive.

Another alternative tis ceramic catalytic filters  for dedusting. Presently there are few examples of this  in practice.

The CataMax(™) catalytic solution is a patent-pending technology from FLSmidth, which will help U.S. cement producers to achieve compliance with the ever stricter environmental regulations. We are already seeing an increased interest in this technology from other customers in the U.S. as well as from customers in Europe and Asia where similar legislative restrictions are also expected in the future," said Jacob Sondergaard, Vice President, FLSmidth Airtech U.S., part of FLSmidth's Product Companies Division in 2015.

The National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) are emissions standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The U.S. was leading the way by having the most stringent regulations in the world today within the cement industry. The Trump presidency and the pandemic  curtailed some of the pollution control investment.

The production of cement is a high temperature process, involving the emission of nitrogen oxides (NO_X). As these are polluting compounds which contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain, an increasing number of countries have tightened controls over NO_x emissions within the cement industry. Germany is leading the way with NO_X limits of 200 mg/Nm³ (daily mean) for cement clinker kilns with waste co-incineration.

Here are some SCR examples.

Deuma

Deuma’s cement plant in Thuringia, owned by the Buzzi Unicem company Dyckerhoff, produces approximately 2,400 tpd of clinker. The existing selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR) system was not able to reduce emissions significantly enough to achieve the new permitted limits on NO_X and NH₃; a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system was therefore necessary.

Milan-based Boldrocchi designed and installed a tailor-made SCR system for high dust environments (the reduction takes place in the dust-laden exhaust gas), complete with a catalyst reactor using ammonia water as a reagent, soot blowers and a compressed air station. Commissioning took place during the summer of 2019 and, after a fine-tuning period necessary to optimize the soot blowing system and the overall process, the SCR system was deemed fit for operation. The system is now currently in stable operation and reduces emissions well within the limits of the German Emission Protection Act (17th BlmSchV).

In 2010, the European Directive 2010/75/EU defined emission limit values for cement plants co-incinerating waste. In Germany, the Ordinance on Waste Incineration and Co-Incineration (17th BlmSchV) implemented the European Norm by defining NO_x emission emission limits for German Cement Kilns with Waste Co-incineration between 200 mg/Nm³ (daily average, dry gas, 10% oxygen) and 400 mg/Nm³ (half hourly average, dry gas, 10% oxygen).

The ammonia emission limit was also tightened, making it difficult to meet both NO_X and NH₃ emission limit values with primary measures or even SNCR processes. SNCR is limited in terms of NO_X removal efficiency and, when pushed to its limit, it can cause high ammonia emissions (slip). It has meant that SCR systems – the state-of-the-art for NO_X reduction in the power sector and for municipal incinerators – have had to be adapted to the cement production process, to replace, or act in conjunction with, existing SNCR systems.

At the Deuma cement plant, the previous SNCR system was altogether replaced with a SCR reactor in which the catalyst allows the reaction between NO_X and NH₃ at lower temperatures – and with higher efficiency – than in the SNCR process.

The catalyst allows reactions to occur in a temperature window of 300 – 400°C. The kiln preheater exit gas is therefore set to this temperature range. Positioning the reactor just after the kiln fan (the so-called ‘high dust arrangement’) was determined to be best for maximum reaction efficiency. There is an issue with this positioning, however: the kiln gas dust load reaches up to 100 gr/Nm³, meaning the soot blowing system must be properly designed to avoid catalyst clogging. Additionally, Boldrocchi has found that an expressly designed preheating system allows operators to manage the kiln start-up operations and transitory phases, avoiding the risk of catalyst deactivation due to improper process conditions.

Dyckerhoff

Dyckerhoff, a Buzzi Unicem company, is an international producer of cement and ready-mixed concrete, operating in Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia as well as in Russia and Ukraine. Buzzi Unicem is a corporation located in Italy, which operates plants in 14 countries, with more than 10,000 employees worldwide. Before most countries had even introduced environmental emissions legislation, in 1909 Boldrocchi started to manufacture heavy-duty fans and by 1914, the company was developing heat exchangers and air filtration equipment to reduce dust emissions. Since that first filter in 1914, Boldrocchi has grown considerably, now with products in 180 countries and offices in eight. Decades of experience and a continued significant investment in R&D has led the company to develop several innovations, including systems that can achieve almost zero-dust emissions (0.1 mg/Nm³) while significantly reducing NO_X (40 mg/Nm³).

Fine tuning such a technology to achieve optimal performance requires cooperation between the manufacturing company and the client. With a common purpose and leveraging complementary knowledge, Dyckerhoff and Boldrocchi joined forces to implement Boldrocchi’s SCR system at the Deuma cement plant. Thanks to the availability of the Dyckerhoff team and their willingness to share their knowledge of the cement production process, Boldrocchi’s experts were able to overcome obstacles encountered during the assembly and start-up phases. The final outcome: Boldrocchi developed an integrated high dust SCR system, reducing NO_x to 180 mg/Nm³ with a tailor-made system, suitable and integrated with existing facilities, with minimal ammonia slip.

The design.

The project’s main objectives were to:

• Design a carefully considered SCR system to obtain maximum pollutant reduction, process efficiency and plant reliability.
• Engineer a soot-blowing system using software modelling tools, in order to evaluate the system’s dust removal efficiency in all operating conditions.
• Pay close attention to the gases’ fluid dynamics in order to ensure an optimal catalyst surface with a minimum variation in gas temperature and speed, as well as the correct NO_X/NH₃ molar ratio.
• Find a method to install the new reactor in a very narrow space between the kiln fan and the raw mill building.
• Integrate the SCR system perfectly with the existing equipment and reuse the entire contents of the ammonia storage and dosing system.

The decision to use a high dust SCR system was mainly due to the optimal reaction temperature it offers and the lower complexity of the entire system, compared to a Tail-End solution. A key factor to the proper design of a High Dust SCR system is the catalyst cleaning efficiency as the dust load is very high. The soot blowing system was completely re-engineered using in-house computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations and calculations. The team started their CFD analysis using mid-dust environment applications, and this improved the efficiency and efficacy for high dust loads. A fully integrated system was designed and supplied which included a compressed air generation station, a distribution net and automation logics. A central distributed control system (DCS) controls the catalyst layers’ differential pressure and drives the soot blowing rack with optimal speed and air flow. The latter is produced by one fixed-speed air compressor and one variable-speed air compressor which modifies the velocity to optimize soot removal from the catalyst surface.

CFD tools were also used in order to optimize the ammonia injection and the gas flow at the catalyst surface. Velocity distribution (which also directly influences the temperature distribution) and the distribution of the molar ratio between NH₃ and NO_X had to be optimized in order to assess the uniformity of the gas at the inlet of the catalyst layer. The parameter used for the analysis of these processes was the coefficient of variation. The ‘velocity coefficient of variation’ of this system usually ranges from 10 to 20%, while the ‘molar ratio coefficient of variation’ is between 5 to 10%. Determining the optimal ammonia injection point, the hood design and the placement of deflectors and perforated plates inside the reactor for this project allowed the team to obtain about 8% ‘velocity coefficient of variation’ and less than 1% ‘molar ratio coefficient of variation’, leading to a significant performance increase for the SCR system at Deuma.

Cemcat SCR Systems

Maerz Ofenbau is a market leader In the supply of lime kilns. It also supplies Cemcat SCR systems and has some on cement kilns in Europe and one in the U.S.

Semi-Dust, USA

Typical Operation

Together with ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions (USA), CemCat built the first semi-dust SCR for a cement plant on the American continent.

Solutions Both Within Products and Advanced Services

In North America, cement demand remains high and high production rates and production bottlenecks create good aftermarket activity. This includes continued interest in retrofits and upgrades. The challenging supply chain and increase in fuel costs is however a concern to many North American cement producers.

U.S. Examples

In 2013, LaFarge Cement entered into a consent decree with the EPA and the US Justice Department as part of a settlement over a string of environmental violations, including excessive smog-forming Nitrogen Oxide (NO_X) emissions. As part of that settlement, Lafarge was to retrofit its Joppa, Illinois "dry process" cement kiln with an SCR unit, record its effectiveness during stack testing, and report on the results of those tests by 2015.

SCR Was Able to Reduce NO_x by 80%.

That's approximately twice as effective as SNCR technology, (Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction), the current pollution control device for NO_x most often used in U.S. cement plants.

In 2013 Holcim's Midlothian cement plant had already applied and been granted one by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for construction and operation of its own SCR unit.

Thomas Cement

In 2019 Thomas Zement has ordered a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) unit from GEA for its Erwite cement plant to reduce its NO_x emissions. The order includes two reactors for selective catalytic reduction (SCR) including handling of the flue gas transport by induced draft (ID) fans and integration into plant. The contract also includes engineering services as well as the supply, installation and commissioning of steel structures, SCR catalysts, ID fans, heating circuits, duct connection and adaptation of NH₃ injection from existing storage tanks. Production will continue at the site during the installation of the SCR unit.

Anhui Conch

In China Anhui Conch’s Jining Conch subsidiary  signed a contract worth US$23m with Conch Design Institute for selective catalytic reduction (SCR) units. Conch Design Institute supplied  SCR denitration technology to Jining Conch including engineering design, equipment supply, construction and installation, engineering supervision and project management. The project was  to be completed by the end of June 2019.

CRH Opterra

in 2019. CRH Opterra Zement’s Karsdorf plant  started a Euro23m upgrade project to its emissions systems. The plant will install SCR units on each of its production lines. Work on the upgrade is scheduled to be completed by the start of 2019.

Holcim WestZement

Holcim WestZement  installed a SCR unit purchased from Yara at its Beckum cement plant. The Euro14.2m project started trial operation at the end of 2018.

Ceskomoravsky Cement

Czech cement producer Českomoravský Cement made an investment of CZK300m (US$13.71m) to improve the environmental performance of its Radotín plant.

The purchase of a new vertical mill and other environmental measures will enable the works to reduce CO₂ emissions by 12 percent and electricity consumption by 24 percent by 2030.

The company intends to select the technology for the new mill this year and prepare project documentation for the building permit application in 2023. If construction can start in mid-2023, the upgraded plant is expected to come online in 2025, according to the Ceska Informaci Agentura news agency.

INDUSTRY  NEWS

Gore SO₂ Capture System Slated For Hindalco

Hindalco has awarded a contract to W.L. Gore for FGD control with its Sorbent Polymer Catalyst technology at the Renusagar Site for an 80-MW unit. The GORE^® SO₂ Control System is a catalytic, reagent-less FGD system designed to fit tight spaces, consume less water, and reduce operating costs.

The GORE^® SO₂ Control System contains fixed catalyst modules that eliminate the need for reagents. These modules, developed by scientists at Gore, convert SO₂ from the flue gas into sulfuric acid which is concentrated into a saleable grade of acid suitable for fertilizer production and other uses.

Gore’s modular, passive system is easy to operate, and can be configured to fit within space-constrained sites. It consumes less water and carries significantly lower operating costs than traditional technologies which enables compliance at the lowest total cost of ownership for power plant operators.

FL  Smidth Reports Strong First Quarter

The first quarter of 2022 saw a strong momentum in order intake driven by both Mining and Cement according to  Mikko Keto, Group CEO  “Despite the tragic war in Ukraine, activity and sentiment in the mining industry remains positive supported by high commodity prices and strong demand for minerals. Integration planning of the ThyssenKrupp Mining business acquisition is progressing according to plan and important regulatory clearances have been received during the quarter. Our Cement business has continued its positive development on improving profitability, despite the cement market remains stable with overcapacity in many regions. Strong organic revenue growth of 23%, mainly driven by Mining. Group EBITA increased by 59% compared to first quarter in 2021 despite increased inflationary pressure, supply chain challenges and negative impact from the war in Ukraine.

Our key priority in this challenging time of war has been on the safety and well-being of our employees. We closely follow this tragic situation to ensure we take the right responsible decisions from a humanitarian, legal, and financial point of view.”

Sanctions imposed on Russia during the first quarter of 2022 have exacerbated the inflationary pressure on energy costs and freight rates, creating additional challenges for many cement producers. Normally exports can provide a buffer for cement producers to unload excess supply and maximize capacity utilization, but this has become increasingly difficult in many regions given supply chain challenges and recent hikes in freight costs. The surge in energy prices represents both a risk and an opportunity. It has forced some cement producers to temporarily shut down production of older and inefficient cement plants. On the other hand, it has created increased interest in productivity enhancement.