Holcim
The Holcim Germany Group, with its 2,100 employees and 150 sites, is one of the largest manufacturers of building materials (cement, aggregates, ready-mix concrete and precast concrete elements) in Germany and the Netherlands. It belongs to the leading global building materials company Holcim Ltd. Holcim signed up to sustainable development many years ago, a commitment that is also part of LafargeHolcim’s global group strategy. In Schleswig-Holstein Holcim operates a cement plant at Lägerdorf near Itzehoe, an export terminal for cement at Brunsbüttel and several sand and gravel plants. With its building materials and services, Holcim supplies solutions to meet some of the greatest challenges facing our society: to create places to live and work, build infrastructure, hydraulic engineering and coastal defence; to facilitate mobility, safeguard energy supplies and deliver innovation.
Activities in the real-world laboratory
The Lägerdorf cement plant is to host a feasibility study in the context of investment preparation for conversion to an oxyfuel process (= NOx saving, closing the material loop — use of surplus oxygen from hydrogen production for the plant’s own production process). The study is also intended to deliver reliable assumptions concerning the technical and economic feasibility of separating out CO2 at the Lägerdorf cement plant (= closing material loops, drastically reducing emissions — CO2 becomes a valuable raw material for synthesising methanol).
Long-term vision
The surplus oxygen (O2) arising from the hydrogen production in Heide will be fed into the cement plant’s combustion process, resulting in concomitant savings of 60% of the current NOx emissions. The high-purity carbon dioxide (CO2) will be captured and in turn used as a raw material in industrial-scale methanol production (100% reduction in CO2 emissions, an annual saving of approx. 1 million tonnes): a major and innovative development step/milestone towards significantly lower-emission cement production. www.holcim.de/de