KN Rao, Director-Energy & Environment, ACC Ltd
ACC has deployed a huge amount of technical resources and also made huge investments for pre-processing facilities and feeding system in various plants of ACC for use of AFR in cement manufacturing process, says KN Rao, Director-Energy & Environment, ACC Ltd. Excerpts from the interview…
Could you shed some light on the roadmap for optimising the use of AFR?
Our active participation as members of the Cement Sustainability Initiative in India culminated in 2012 in the charting of the low carbon technology roadmap for cement industry. We are working diligently as per our technology roadmap to cut emissions by a further 20 per cent by 2040.
What are the types of AFRs used in your plants?
ACC uses various hazardous wastes as raw materials such as waste generated from Nanjangud unit of Jubilant Organosys (Karnataka) are disposed through co-processing in ACC?s Wadi Cement Works (Karnataka) while at the Kymore Plant in Madhya Pradesh, ACC is using cow-dung and wild weeds as alternative fuels to fire its cement kilns. The company is utilising wastes from agro industry, municipalities and industries like paints, automobiles, textile machinery, steel plants, FMCGs, refineries and petrochemicals, among others. In some of its plants, the company also uses plastic as a raw material to generate energy in producing cement. Even materials like rubber tubes which cannot be composted are burned in the cement kilns without affecting environment in anyway.
What is the percentage of TSR achieved?
ACC provides its co-processing services to more than 20 different industrial sectors and more than 10 municipal corporations, at nine of its cement plants located across the country. This process has been successfully initiated in many ACC plants located across India at Karnataka, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan to name a few.
About 40 per cent thermal substitution of coal with waste in a million tonne capacity plant reduces one lakh tonne of carbon emissions. About 2.5 million tonne of fossil fuel (coal) is saved with the substitution of 5 per cent waste ACC co-processes.
A quantum leap was achieved in the usage of AFR, thereby enabling a TSR of 4.36 per cent against a target of 4.12 per cent (annual report 2013).
To what extent this has resulted in reducing the carbon footprint?
The various initiatives taken resulted in reducing the specific CO2 emissions per tonne of cement to 526 kg CO2/tonne of cement from 538 kg CO2/tonne of cement. The CO2emission per tonne of cement including emissions from onsite power generation has been reduced to 617 kg CO2/tonne of cement from 641 kg CO2/tonne of cement.