The cement industry, already self-conscious about its carbon-emissions impact on climate, says it was delivered something of a double-whammy by British Columbia’s carbon tax.
The tax, at $30 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, pushed up the cost of coal — the industry’s primary fuel for its energy-intensive process — to between $53 and $62 per tonne at B.C. cement plants after it was applied in 2008, said Michael McSweeney, president of the Canadian Cement Association.
Then they watched as cheaper imports from Asia and the U.S. cut into their market share, from six per cent of the market before the tax to 40 per cent now, McSweeney said.
The industry, which employs some 3,000 people in B.C., has been marked by down time and layoffs since, he said.
So the 2015 B.C. provincial budget, which included a five-year transition plan to help the industry wean itself off a lot of that coal — including a three-year, $22-million “incentive program” — came as a relief to a sector that has been lobbying hard for some help.
The lower-carbon and zero-carbon alternatives the industry is exploring range from waste wood and un-reusable residuals from recycling to a bio coal.
“It jumped off the page to us,” McSweeney said when Finance Minister Mike de Jong gave the program a specific, high-profile mention when he unveiled the 2015 budget Feb. 17.
De Jong, in his budget speech, said government’s hope is that “B.C.’s cement industry can produce a product that is competitively priced and that sets the standard for environmental sustainability.”
McSweeney said the industry is “very happy (government) now views cement as a strategic commodity in B.C.”
The overall plan is still being worked out between the industry and the Ministry of Environment, which is a point of contention for the NDP opposition. But McSweeney said generally the major plants operated by Lafarge Canada (in Richmond and Kamloops) and Lehigh-Hanson (Delta) would use the money to help subsidize the development of alternative fuel sources.
The political opposition in Victoria remains supportive but wary of the transition plan, because they have yet to see a detailed plan, said NDP environment critic Spencer Chandra-Herbert. He would prefer to see a bigger-picture effort.
“I get (the industry’s) challenge,” Chandra-Herbert said. “My big concern is that this is a one-off (effort), while there are a whole bunch of industries that need help (reducing emissions).
Making cement is an energy-intensive process. To make a tonne of cement, B.C. plants shovel about a tonne-and-a-half of Texada Island limestone and other ingredients into a long kiln, fired by about 140 kilograms of coal per tonne, until it is a semi-molten lava of 1,450 C.
That heat, McSweeney said, sets off the chemical reaction in which carbon is stripped out of the limestone to be emitted as carbon dioxide, and creates about 60 per cent of cement-making’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
“(Those) are process emissions,” McSweeney said. “It doesn’t matter how you process — that 60 per cent emissions will always be there.”
The lava cool quickly into a hardened, almost metallic material called clinker, which is ground and blended with other elements to become cement, “the glue” that (at 7-to-10 per cent of the mix) binds sand, gravel and water into the essential construction material concrete.
It is the 40 per cent of carbon emissions related to firing the kilns that B.C.’s cement makers want to attack with the transition program.
Canadian cement manufacturers are signatories to the Cement Sustainability Initiative of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which aims at curbing carbon emissions from its existing production, recognizing that economic forecasts call for production to rise.
In B.C., the goal is to increase alternative fuels to 40 per cent, McSweeney said, and the more they can use wood-based fuels classified as carbon-neutral biomass, the better.
At Lafarge Canada’s Richmond plant, they are hitting a 30-per-cent substitution rate now with a corporate goal to reach 50 per cent by 2020, said plant manager Pascal Bouchard, with a lot of scrap lumber from construction demolition and sawdust from local mills in the mix.
And due to the high temperatures involved in cement making, Pascal said, the kilns are effective incinerators for other materials such as residuals from plastic recycling, nylon from tire recycling and carpet backing, which don’t push emissions over Metro Vancouver’s air-quality standards.
Another benefit of those substitutions is that cement makers can use the ash produced as an ingredient in cement and don’t have to landfill it.
“We need to work with government,” on developing the transition program, Pascal said, but he would like some of the money to go into subsidizing the capital costs of installing the equipment for handling the new fuels.
The industry did put a lot of work into encouraging government, spending $171,478 on political contributions since 2009. Most, $128,988, has gone to the B.C. Liberal Party, and just $42,490 to the NDP.
And in the last year, records in the B.C. registry of lobbyists show that the Cement Association and Lafarge Canada have lobbied a long list of cabinet ministers, MLAs and officials including de Jong, Premier Christy Clark, Environment Minister Mary Polak and MLAs on the opposition side.
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