This article was published in May 2010 issue of World Port Development. To receive a pdf of the article in its original format including charts and pictures please send an email to archive@worldportdevelopment.
Conveyor systems makers transfixed by the ‘R’ word
Ray Dykes reports on how manufacturers of conveyor systems are focused on recovery.
The world’s manufacturers of conveyor systems have their focus clearly on the “R” word – and that’s no longer the dreaded recession but rather recovery. And there are signs, albeit small ones so far, that they have turned the corner after the ravishing of the bottom line caused by the global economic meltdown most knew as the worst recession they had experienced in their lifetimes. Surprisingly, some major firms such as conveyor systems market leader, ContiTech of Germany, still made a profit in 2009 as a group; some, such as Italian CVS Ferrari, a maker of heavy port handling equipment, have sought insolvency proceedings while they try to sort out finances. Others were reluctant to talk about their fortunes in what has been a tough period for the bulk handling industry in general. “Not this time,” was a common response to questions from World Port Development about reviewing their performance through the recession months.
Recovery
However, the first hint of recovery for some conveyor makers, whose business dropped as much as 75% in 2009, is a marked increase in bid or study requests. These time-consuming efforts could end up in Requests for Proposals and are seen as a welcome sign of better times ahead that many in the bulk handling equipment industry were seeking. It means that projects shelved over the past 16 months or so were being dusted off, revisited, and perhaps, readied for action once more by bulk materials customers. “The market appears to be turning around, but we’re not back to where we were one or two years ago,” says Greg Andrew, Chief Engineer Mechanical for Worley Parsons Vancouver BC office, a consulting engineering firm specialising in bulk handling systems around the world. “There are projects that appear to be coming back on line again.” Worley Parsons is experiencing a higher number of “study type jobs” rather than detailed design contracts and the hope is that some of them will turn into “real projects.” Andrew says the study work is still a “good sign” as usually one out of every 10 study projects “will end up going somewhere.”
Large projects
The mood was echoed on the United States east coast where conveyor system specialists, Knight Industrial Equipment of Florida, has experienced a jump in requests for budget studies domestically and on large projects, particularly in Europe, Morocco and Peru, involving conveyors serving port facilities. And it’s just as well there is a growing surge of interest as Knight’s business in 2009 was down 70% on normal. Only backlog work and a major gypsum project with Georgia Pacific in Savannah, Georgia, kept them going. That project handles gypsum from Nova Scotia at an incoming rate of 2,000 tonnes per hour and to the plant at 600tph. The Knight system included a steel pan type apron feeder, 48 inch and 36 inch wide belt conveyors, tripper, magnets and belt scales. With 26 years in the conveyor system business, Bob Knight, Knight Industrial’s founder and President, says he is expecting a total turnaround by the end of the year.
Growth opportunity
At ContiTech in Germany, which manufactures or develops its conveyor belt technology at 10 locations throughout the world including Chile, China, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Mexico, Slovakia and at home, the global recession is being used as an “opportunity for growth.” At the end of 2009 it actually had increased its worldwide workforce to 22,079 – up slightly on 2008, while remaining profitable despite sales being down from Euro3 billion to Euro2.4 billion for the group. In Europe, ContiTech lays claim to being the market leader in conveyor belts and conveyor belt service materials used for the cleaning, splicing and bonding of belts, as well as for wear protection. And in April 2009, ContiTech purchased the Serbian conveyor belt company Univerzal Kolubara d.o.o. as a building block to establishing a firmer foothold in the Eastern European market. ContiTech intends to invest in production at Veliki Crljeni, just south of Belgrade, and has its eyes on the lignite rich region nearby, which helps power much of the country’s electricity generation needs.
Major order
All is far from gloomy at Denmark’s Cimbria Contec, a major global supplier of conveying expertise and a significant supplier of screw conveyors. Cimbria Contec is a member of the Danish Cimbria Group of companies and a sister company, Cimbria Bulk Equipment, delivered 29 extraction and transport screw conveyors to Hey’di in Norway as it expands a cement plant. The tubular screw conveyors are designed for high throughput and for conveying bulk materials with abrasive characteristics such as cement, lime, sand or slag. The 29 screw conveyors are all equipped with greased for life, high quality SKF stand-off bearings and adjustable packing boxes, which is standard detail on all heavy duty screw conveyors when carrying abrasive products or powders, or when handling high temperature products. The project also saw the supply of conveying equipment for transporting the finished goods to a road tanker, Big-Bag or a sack-filling system.
Good news
There was plenty of good news, too, for ThyssenKrupp Fordertechnik, of Germany, which has successfully commissioned a pipe conveyor for handling raw materials at the first aluminum smelter to be built in the sheikhdom of Qatar in the Persian Gulf. Four other systems will follow as the plant construction for Qatar Aluminum (Qatalum) continues through to completion by the end of 2010 and other bulk handling plants are built. The first shiploads of powdery alumina and lumpy petroleum coke were successfully handled by the pipe conveyor in January 2010. The conveyor takes the raw materials from ship to the plant over one kilometer and at elevations up to 80 meters – without transfer points – to storage silos near the smelter at a rate up to 2,000tph. With a pipe diameter of 590mm, the conveyor is one of largest systems to be built by ThyssenKrupp. Following the success of the Qatalum plant conveyor, ThyssenKrupp has the contract for conveying systems at two other new Qatar plants – two pipe conveyors are under construction for the Qafco 5 for the Qatar Fertiliser Co and two further pipe conveyors for Qafco 6 (another urea plant), which are still in the design stage. The big Qafco 5 contract for general contractor Saipem of Italy, included a shiploader, a scraper-reclaimer, and the complete conveyor system, including two large pipe conveyors. Qatar Fertiliser is a world-class producer of fertiliser and the world’s largest single site urea producer at its Qafco 5 plant in the city of Qatar about 40 kilometers south of Doha, the capital city and seat of government. For ThyssenKrupp, the recent urea contract through Saipem continues a long-standing, successful cooperation with the Italian company, which has also seen them working together in similar projects for Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and OMIFCO, Oman. And, also in 2009, ThyssenKrupp commissioned a new belt conveyor for operation at a coke oven plant for HKM Huttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) at Duisburg, Germany, which boasts the world’s largest inland harbour. The system also allows for the supply of coal to HKM’s new pulverized-coal injection plant located at the rear of the coke plant by making use of the port conveyor running in the reverse direction.
Going green
Meanwhile, conveyor systems are increasingly being used to help companies go green by replacing the need for polluting and inefficient truck hauls and to speed up ship load and unload times, thus reducing marine emissions and saving customers ship delay fees. In one case Knight Industrial Equipment saved Cargill Fertilizer in Tampa Florida the cost of
conveyor system capital expense through the reduction in ship demurrage charges alone. There are other benefits, too, and as Knights says: “As the tonnage goes up on conveyor systems, the cost per tonne drops dramatically.” As for innovation, the ContiTech Conveyor Belt Group has developed a special rubber compound which it says minimises rolling resistance of conveyor belts, achieving a 20% reduction in energy consumption during raw material transportation. The smoother belts also reduce CO2 emissions significantly and Hanover University Institute for Transport and Automation studies confirm that 3,000 kilowatts of input power can be saved on a five-kilometer conveyor system. That means that the amount of energy saved in 1.5 hours is equivalent to the consumption in one year by an average four-person household in Germany. “Although the results so far are very good, we are still keeping the topic of energy-optimised conveyor belts on our agenda,” says ContiTech’s head of R&D, Wilhelm Schrand. “We’re constantly working to further improve our solutions so as to make an even bigger contribution towards making raw materials handling systems even more economical, more eco-friendly, and more sustainable.” ContiTech showcased its energy-saving belts at the April Bauma 2010 in Munich, the international industry trade show for construction and building material machines, which is held every three years.
Braking energy
And with worldwide demand for raw materials growing at a reported 4% a year, ContiTech climate and eco-friendly conveyor belt units are also capable of generating electricity by transforming braking energy into electrical energy. In Jamaica, for example, a RopeCon conveyor is in operation hauling more than 1,200 tonnes of bauxite an hour over 3.4 kilometers as it drops 470 meters to port. The transformation of braking energy into electrical energy yields 1,300kw and the current is fed into a local power grid. Furthermore, the system replaces up to 1,200 truck runs a day and eliminates the corresponding amount of CO2 and particulate emissions. Dust control, particularly at transfer points, is also improving according to Bob Knight of Knight Industrial. He adds that there’s now more attention to better methods of cleaning belts and in general “just working on housekeeping methods to reduce spillage or contamination.” Totally enclosing belts is also becoming more common as the industry does its best to help protect the environment.
Bio fuels
But, not all is well in the green kingdom. As more and more plants switch to run on bio fuels there can be increasing handling problems, says Greg Andrew of consulting engineers Worley Parsons. While Europe has been using bio fuels for years, the switch to bio fuels from former coal handling systems isn’t easy, he says. British Columbia and Ontario are embracing bio fuels more and more in Canada, but the eco-friendly fuels are proving a lot more difficult to handle. “We have had incidents of handling wood pellets that lead to fires and explosions and not infrequent deaths due to oxygen deprivation,” warns Andrew. “The systems are much more complex than handling coal or grains.” While bio fuels are becoming a larger percentage of materials conveyed around the world, Andrew says the conveying systems still need more work to get them to a more acceptable safety level.