Lafarge South Africa is looking into ways to decrease its coal dependency, and biomass and landfills might be the answer. With the rise in coal prices, the cement producer group’s purchasing manager Alan Scott said the company has decided not to compete with the export market and will attempt to cut back coal usage by 20%. However, this will put Lafarge in competition with state-owned power utility Eskom.
Lafarge used approximately two million tons of coal a year to produce 16 million tons of cement, and Scott said production would increase to about 19 million tons in 2010, pushing up coal demand to 2.6 million tons.
Using biomass and other alternative sources in its boiler operations is an option but it will not totally replace coal. Scott noted that there was not enough biomass to sustain the current levels of production.