Gypsum industry news

Oman: The country exported 8.07Mt of gypsum from January 2024 to August 2024, according to data from Zawawi Minerals. Oman exported 11.2Mt in 2023, up by 11% year-on-year from 9.9Mt in 2022.

US: US gypsum wallboard sales grew by 1% year-on-year to 628Mm² during the first quarter of 2024. The country imported 20.1Mm² of gypsum wallboard, down by 13% year-on-year. Mexico supplied 19.3Mm² (96%) and Canada 800,000m² (4%) of imports. Meanwhile, the US exported 19.1Mm² of gypsum wallboard during the quarter, 18Mm² (94%) of it to Canada.

Azerbaijan: Azerbaijan’s production of construction gypsum increased by 98% year-on-year to 85,000t in 2023, data from the State Statistics Committee has shown. BNI IntelliNews has reported year-on-year growth of 32% in the overall value of building materials produced in Azerbaijan in 2023, to US$694m.

US: National consumption of gypsum wallboard dropped by 4.3% year-on-year to 2.51Mm² in 2023, according to United States Geological Survey (USGS) data. Demand for natural gypsum was 45Mt, up by 3% from 43.7Mt in 2022. The market imported 8.1Mt of gypsum throughout the year, up by 18% year-on-year.

Domestic production of crude gypsum in the US dropped by 1.3% year-on-year in 2023, to 22Mt. Exports grew by 15% to 45,000t.

US: The US Geological Survey reported domestic natural gypsum production volumes of 16.3Mt during the first nine months of 2023, down by 0.3% year-on-year from 16.4Mt during the corresponding part of 2022. Meanwhile, calcined gypsum production volumes grew by 1.2%, to 14Mt from 13.8Mt. Throughout the period, the US imported 5.91Mt of crude gypsum, up by 35% year-on-year. Spain supplied 2.4Mt (41%) of imports, followed by Mexico with 1.7Mt (29 %) and Canada with 1.56Mt (26%).

Georgia-Pacific officially opened its new gypsum wallboard plant at Sweetwater in Texas earlier this month. The US$325m project is situated next to the company’s existing plant at the site, Sweetwater West, on the other side of a road. Canada-based Gyptech said in 2021 that it was supplying the equipment for the new high-speed line at the site.

When Georgia-Pacific first announced the new project in 2020, it mentioned that it would be able to keep its logistics costs low, use raw gypsum reserves and the existing workforce. Despite this, the plant has still created over 100 new jobs. The company also said that it anticipated closing its 60Mm²/yr Quanah plant, also in Texas, depending upon market conditions. This came to pass in March 2023. Altogether, both plants at Sweetwater will have a production capacity of around 93Mm²/yr. This implies that the new plant has a production capacity of around 60Mm²/yr, given that the existing plant’s capacity is 30Mm²/yr. Funnily enough this is the same as the Quanah plant.

The new plant at Sweetwater may be a sign that the US wallboard market is picking up again. Georgia-Pacific has invested some serious money and it is targeting Texas, a leading area for construction nationally. However, it does come with a few caveats. Firstly, the new plant at Sweetwater is replacing existing capacity at Quanah. Secondly, it is using some of the advantages of the existing plant such as its trucks and its proximity to its customers. This suggests that the company may be wary of building a new plant in a greenfield location with all the potential risks that might involve.

US wallboard sales have regularly peaked and troughed over the decades, like many other commodity markets, as demand and production capacity race each other. Sales of wallboard peaked around the year 2000 and then again in the mid 2000s before tailing off following the 2007 recession. They have been recovering ever since and started to get close to the levels seen in the first half of the 2000s in 2022 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported wallboard sales of 2.6Bnm².

Generally, the last tranche of new wallboard plants in the US were built or approved in the late 2000s before the financial downturn. These new sites included CertainTeed’s Roxboro plant in North Carolina and the Moundsville plant in West Virginia, Gold Bond Building Products’ Mount Holly plant in North Carolina and American Gypsum’s Georgetown plant in South Carolina. From this point though various plants were either closed or mothballed. Some of the latter have been restarted as the market slowly recovered. New plant projects in the 2010s tended to be upgrades or replacements. One example of this was USG’s plan to rebuild a production line at its Jacksonville plant in Florida, which was announced in late 2017 before Knauf took over the company in 2018. Another was National Gypsum’s scheme to reopen its Wilmington plant in North Carolina in 2019. At the same time in the 2010s there were a number of mergers and acquisitions including Lafarge’s sale of its gypsum business in North America in 2013, Knauf’s takeover of USG in 2019 and Saint-Gobain’s acquisition of Continental Building Products in 2020.

When Georgia-Pacific started building the new plant at Sweetwater in 2020 this marked the start of a new phase of US wallboard plant projects. American Gypsum announced plans for an upgrade to its Albuquerque gypsum wallboard plant in 2021, Gold Bond Building Products started building its long-delayed Eloy plant in Arizona in 2022 and it said it was spending US$90m on an upgrade to its Mount Holly gypsum wallboard plant in North Carolina in 2023, and CertainTeed revealed it wanted to build a second production line at its Palatka gypsum wallboard plant in Florida also in 2023.

Congratulations are due to Georgia-Pacific for the achievement at Sweetwater. Optimism for the US market in general may also be in order given the slow but steady stream of projects that have been announced and completed since 2020. The next step, when a company builds a new wallboard plant at a greenfield site in the US, looks set to happen when Gold Bond Building Products completes its Eloy plant.

Oman: Oman exported 8.75Mt of gypsum in the first nine months of 2023, a rise of 23% year-on-year from 7.09Mt in the same period in 2022. Data from Oman-based Zawawi Minerals shows that 48% of exports were sent to India.

US: Data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) show that the sale of gypsum board products fell by 5% to 1.25Bnm² in the first half of 2023, from 1.31Bnm² in the same period in 2022. The total supply of crude gypsum grew by 9% to 20.4Mt. Notably, supplies of imported and synthetic gypsum increased in the reporting period. However, the USGS noted that on a quarterly basis “...variances are often the result of differences in weather conditions, which can impede or encourage construction activities, coupled with market demands that are often driven by residential and commercial building activity. Use of uncalcined gypsum remained stable, but consumption of calcined gypsum fell by 33% to 7.86Mt, due to reduced utilisation in board products. Spain, Canada and Mexico remained the main sources of import of crude gypsum. However, imports from Türkiye more than doubled to 195,000t.

Azerbaijan: Total national gypsum production was 36,500t during the first half of 2023, according to the State Statistics Committee. This corresponds to a 96% year-on-year rise from first-half 2022 levels.

US: The US gypsum wallboard industry produced 623Mm² of gypsum wallboard during the first quarter of 2023, down by 1% year-on-year and by 1.2% quarter-on-quarter. The industry exported 20.1Mm² of gypsum wallboard in the quarter under review, corresponding to 19% year-on-year growth. Canada received 19Mm² of the product, 94% of total exports for the quarter.

United States Geological Survey (USGS) data show 4% year-on-year growth in US gypsum wallboard imports. The country imported 23Mm² during the year, 20.9Mm² (91%) of it from Mexico and 1.84Mm² (8%) from Canada. Total calcined gypsum consumption was 4.66Mt in the US in the first quarter of 2023, up by 9.9% year-on-year from 4.24Mt in the first quarter of 2022.