cement industry? I don't know if I don't count, but I was really shocked by the statistics. This is no exaggeration.
Recently, a list of clinker production lines published by a southern province in 2023 shows that there are 45 clinker production lines in the province, of which 41 are in production, involving 42.129 million tons of clinker production capacity. The output of clinker in 2023 is 53.8931 million tons. Based on 60 days of peak staggering production in 2023, 29 of the 41 production lines in the province were overproduced, accounting for 70.73%, and the overproduction rate of all 29 lines was higher than 10%, and the production line with the highest overproduction rate even reached 70.49%. Coincidentally
, the list of clinker production lines issued by a western province in 2023 shows that 66 of the 91 clinker production lines in the province have different degrees of overproduction, accounting for 72.5% . Among them, there are 18 production lines with overproduction rate of 10% -30%, 28 production lines with overproduction rate of 30% -60%, 14 production lines with overproduction rate of 60% -100%, and 2 production lines with overproduction rate of more than 100%, showing obvious overload operation.
In January 2018, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment issued the Notice on the Issuance of the List of Major Changes in Construction Projects in Fourteen Industries, such as Pulp and Paper, attached to the List of Major Changes in Cement Construction Projects (Trial Implementation). The list of major changes in cement construction projects (for trial implementation) is applicable to cement manufacturing (including supporting mines and co-processing) and the construction of independent grinding stations. The first provision is that the production capacity of cement clinker shall be increased by 10% or more; the mining capacity of supporting mines or the production capacity of cement grinding shall be increased by 30% or more. Article 24 of
the Environmental Impact Assessment Law clearly States that after the approval of the environmental impact assessment documents of a construction project, the nature, scale, location, production process adopted or measures to prevent pollution and ecological damage of the construction project have undergone major changes. The construction unit shall re-submit the environmental impact assessment document of the construction project for approval.
In short, production lines with clinker overproduction of 10% or more are major changes in scale and need to re-submit EIA documents for approval! These overproduction production lines should ask themselves whether their overproduction behavior is illegal?
(The figure is irrelevant to this article.)
At present, the situation of overcapacity in the cement industry is becoming increasingly severe. On the one hand, the demand is declining; on the other hand, the effective capacity is increased through capacity replacement and transformation. There are also many enterprises that have expanded their capacity and overproduction through technological transformation. All these have brought a lot of negative effects to the supply side reform of the cement industry. Another result
of overproduction is the weakening of the effect of off-peak production. The competent authorities have made great efforts to promote peak-staggering production, but under the "small ninety-nine" of the enterprises, they have made great efforts to overproduce or build clinker storage depots. As a result, the effect of peak staggering production is greatly reduced.
Now the industry has also realized the interference and impact of overproduction on the healthy operation of the industry. Guo Shiqing, marketing director of Huaxin Cement Co., Ltd., said at the "50-person Forum on Cement Economy" just sponsored by China Cement Network that peak-staggering production should be based on the number of peak-staggering days and the approved production capacity.
Of course, there are also different opinions in the industry that it is proposed to implement the approved production capacity, if implemented, it will inevitably increase the energy consumption per ton of products, because the demand will not change significantly for the time being, and the higher unit consumption means an increase in energy consumption. This leads to the increase of final energy consumption and the increase of total carbon, which is not only a negation of the concept of innovation and development of enterprises, but also runs counter to the direction of national policy guidance.
It should be said that in essence, there is no contradiction between the approved production capacity and the enterprise's consumption reduction and carbon reduction. Through technical transformation, the scale of the production line can be expanded, and the replacement of the replacement and the environmental assessment of the environmental assessment can be carried out in accordance with the national capacity replacement policy and environmental protection policy. Neither want to implement capacity replacement, nor want to re-EIA, blindly striving to reduce unit consumption through overproduction is the negation of the concept of enterprise innovation and development, which runs counter to the direction of national policy guidance.
At present, what cement enterprises should do is to produce in strict accordance with the approved production capacity, and to re-submit the EIA documents in time if there is an overproduction of 10% or more. Of course, we should not forget that part of the overproduction capacity needs to go through the procedures of capacity replacement and replace the corresponding capacity, otherwise it is also illegal!
