Gypsum industry news

Australia: Saint-Gobain subsidiary CSR plans to expand its Welshpool gypsum wallboard plant in Western Australia. The producer plans to upgrade the plant’s production line and expand warehouses that serve it and the neighbouring Bradford building materials plant. CSR said that the upgrade to the Welshpool wallboard plant will reduce its consumption of natural gas and electricity and facilitate its transition to alternative fuels or electricity.

CEO Paul Dalton said "This significant investment will make Welshpool safer and more sustainable, increase capacity and improve productivity and cost efficiency, all while removing risk from our supply chain.”

Romania: Saint-Gobain Romania has signed a 5-year renewable power purchase agreement (PPA) with OMV PetRom. Under the PPA, OMV PetRom will provide power from wind and solar power plants to Saint-Gobain Romania, beginning in January 2026. Total energy supplied under the contract will be 800GWh. This will cover 100% of the producer’s electricity consumption.

Italy: Saint-Gobain has entered into a 10-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Switzerland-based utilities provider Axpo Holding. Under the agreement, Axpo Holding will supply 22GWh/yr of renewable electricity from a newly built wind farm in Puglia. The deal will fulfil 11% of Saint-Gobain's Italian energy needs across 10 sites.

The latest PPA with Axpo Italia is Saint-Gobain's fifth in Italy. Collectively, these will bring the group’s reliance on renewables in its Italian operations to 20%.

UAE: The wallboard recycling unit at Saint-Gobain Gyproc’s Abu Dhabi gypsum wallboard plant has processed 22,000t of gypsum since 2014, the L'Usine Nouvelle newspaper has reported. The producer said that the Abu Dhabi plant can incorporate 10 – 12% recycled materials in its gypsum wallboard production. It runs on a diversified energy supply, which in its most recent recorded month included 55% nuclear, 38% natural gas and 7% solar energy.

In 2023, Saint-Gobain reduced its non-recycled waste by 78% year-on-year and its water footprint by 14% from 2017 levels in the UAE.

Securing sustainable energy sources has been the priority for some of Spain’s gypsum wallboard producers in recent weeks.

In late November 2023 Pladur revealed that it plans to use green hydrogen at its production plants from the second half of 2024 onwards. It will start at its Valdemoro plant near Madrid before rolling usage out elsewhere afterwards. The subsidiary of Belgium-based Etex is also considering trials with biomethane and biogas. Then a few weeks later in early December 2023 Knauf Ibérica announced that it is planning to build a 7.5MW biomass unit at its Guixers plant in Lleida. Commissioning is currently scheduled for late 2024. This follows the installation of solar panels at the site earlier in 2023. Along similar lines, Saint-Gobain Placo signed an 11-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with electricity company Endesa at the end of 2022 to supply 150GWh/yr of renewable energy. Together with a previous renewable energy deal this was expected to cover up to 65% of the group’s electricity requirements in Spain.

Wallboard plants all over the world have been embarking on sustainable energy drives in recent years but the particular drivers in Spain are worth mentioning. The country’s high electricity prices have frequently been raised by large-scale industrial users in the past, often in terms of competitiveness of exports. However, the situation worsened following the start of the war in Ukraine in early 2022 as the wholesale price of coal and gas jumped. The high price of gas in particular pushed the electricity prices up in Spain and wallboard plants typically use both sources of energy. The government eventually capped the price of gas and coal for power generation. It then offered an aid scheme for large-scale gas users but missed the gypsum sector out, much to the chagrin of the Asociación Técnica y Empresarial del Yeso (ATEDY), which complained about it at the end of 2022. The gypsum industry was later included in July 2023 when a funding scheme was announced. It’s unknown how much this initiative has helped wallboard manufacturers but the shift to renewables by the three main companies mentioned above tells its own story.

Despite the energy supply problems a new entrant to the wallboard market in Spain announced itself in March 2023. Italy-based Fassa Bortolo said it was going to spend Euro90m on building a wallboard plant at Tarancón in Cuenca. No commissioning date or main supplier name has been disclosed, but Italy-based Bedeschi did say in late November 2023 that it was providing raw bulk material handling equipment including an apron feeder, stacker, excavator and conveyor belt line. There has also been no word on how the new plant will power itself.

On the topic of exports, Spain has long been one of the world’s larger shippers of natural gypsum. Data from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) shows that the country exported 9.2Mt of gypsum in 2021 with a value of Euro60m. Whether this changed in 2022 when the energy prices increased is unknown at the time of writing. In 2021 Almería was the epicentre of the country, accounting for 70% of the 13Mt total volume of gypsum extracted that year with a quarry at Sorbas, operated by Saint-Gobain Placo, reportedly being the second largest in the world. Most of the gypsum extracted at Sorbas was then driven by truck to the Port of Garrucha, making it the busiest gypsum port in Europe by volume.

Eurogypsum, the European federation of national associations of producers of gypsum products, launched its industry roadmap to net-zero by 2050 on 9 November 2023 at the Global Gypsum Conference 2023, which took place in Chicago, US. Various actions and technologies were unveiled as part of the plan including some of the approaches being taken in Spain such as using ‘green’ electricity, biomass and green hydrogen. All of these suggestions were split into short, mid and final term feasibility categories. So, for example, using renewable sourced electricity is dependent on it being affordable and available. It was placed in the immediate category. Yet, using biofuels or green hydrogen is flagged as requiring investment, so deemed as short-to-mid term.

Spain presents a case where the cost of energy for industrial users may be aligning with sustainability goals. How this translates onto balance sheets remains to be seen though. These kinds of sustainable energy projects may only be slowing the inevitable as raw material and energy costs mount anyway leading to tighter margins, increased competition and potential consolidation. The gypsum sector in Spain may well be testing out slightly earlier than elsewhere how much a more sustainable world will actually cost.

North America: Saint-Gobain has signed a 100MW solar power purchase agreement (PPA), called Danish Fields, with TotalEnergies. The Danish Fields PPA will supply Saint-Gobain North America with solar energy for 15 years, commencing in 2024. Saint-Gobain says that it expects the PPA to eliminate 90,000t/yr of CO₂ emissions across its operations. This is the group’s third deal of its kind.

Saint-Gobain North America CEO Mark Rayfield said “With this agreement, Saint-Gobain North America will further reduce its CO₂ emissions, demonstrating how fast the manufacturing industry can transform when long term solutions are at hand. This renewable energy project is a new milestone on the way to meeting Saint-Gobain’s commitment to reduce Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions by 33% by 2030 compared to 2017, and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.”

One can tell that gypsum wallboard is a popular product because companies keep trying to devise alternatives to it. A recent one is Breathaboard. The company making it, Adaptavate, announced in August 2023 that it had generated around Euro2.3m in its latest investment round. It is building a pilot production line in Bristol in the UK and attempting to licence its Breathaboard product, amongst other plans. Its take on wallboard is being marketed as a sustainable substitute that is made from crop waste, that sequesters CO₂ and that then can be composted at the end of its life. It is also promoting the product’s breathability and moisture buffering capabilities, hence the name.

Another new contender hoping to steal some of the gypsum wallboard market is Xeriant’s Nexaboard product. This one uses plastic waste as its alternative to gypsum. Florida-based Xeriant said in July 2023 that it had started to buy equipment and raw materials, was running pilot production and was testing its first samples. It too is working on getting its product used in pilot construction projects.

Both of these examples, and others over the years, have taken a pop at wallboard’s sustainability credentials. Adaptavate is rather quieter about what happens to all of that sequestered CO₂ when its product is composted and Xeriant does not mention the environmental impact of making the plastic it uses in the first place. Yet, it is a valid question to ask how sustainable is gypsum wallboard? This column has covered issues with the supply of raw gypsum from either natural, synthetic or recycled sources previously, so we will stick to the general picture here.

The late-lamented consultant Bob Bruce pulled together data from various studies for the Global Gypsum Conference in 2019 to estimate the CO₂ emissions from wallboard production. He estimated that the global average of CO₂ production by wallboard was around 2.4kg/m², equating to 24Mt/yr of CO₂ for the global wallboard industry. For reference, it is estimated by the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO) that the process emissions from clinker production alone released around 1.6Gt/yr of CO₂ in 2022. When compared by mass (as opposed to area) to other building materials, wallboard has a lower carbon intensity than many products such as glass, cement (made from clinker), plastics, steel and plywood. Timber, concrete and brick are all better than wallboard though. However, as Bruce pointed out, a lot more concrete is manufactured than wallboard. Bruce came up with a handful of suggestions for how wallboard production could reduce its CO₂ emissions such as the reduction of slurry water, local delivery, co-generation, increasing drying efficiency and so on.

The two big sustainability trends from the sector over the last year have been the drive to support higher recycling rates of gypsum and a move towards ‘greener’ sources of energy. This can be seen in the growing use of electrical energy from renewable sources such as the production of net zero CO₂ gypsum wallboard at Saint-Gobain’s Fredrikstad plant in Norway from April 2023. The group’s Montreal plant looks set to follow in 2024 following an upgrade, potentially making it the first net zero wallboard plant in North America. Chiyoda-Ute in Japan has also started using renewably-sourced electricity at its plants in Japan, but it is uncertain what other energy sources these sites are using. China-based BNBM also claimed in its half-year results that it had built four “nearly zero emission” gypsum board production lines in the reporting period.

Wallboard's market position in North America, Europe and elsewhere seems secure. However, it is in dynamic tension as it is both a potential replacement for more carbon intensive building materials and it could also be susceptible to new emerging products that can improve on its own emissions. The manufacturers of Breathaboard and Nexaboard are clearly hoping for the latter. Yet, as is often pointed out, giving more market share to wallboard from other common building materials could reduce CO₂ emissions from construction massively. The diversification of traditional heavy building materials companies such as Holcim into light building materials in recent years suggests that some businesses are seriously preparing for this possibility. No doubt, if global wallboard usage does start to rise significantly, the pressure will grow to make wallboard more sustainable and to devise even more alternative board products.

Japan: Chiyoda-Ute will add its Chiba gypsum wallboard plant to its ‘green electricity’ mark scheme from September 2023. The certificate from Japan Natural Energy shows that products have been manufactured at a plant using electricity generated from a renewable source. The switch to using renewably-sourced electricity is expected to reduce CO₂ emissions at the Chiba plant by 3800t/yr.

Japan: Chiyoda-Ute plans to mark the packaging of its gypsum wallboard product with a ‘green electricity’ mark when it has been manufactured at a plant using electricity generated from a renewable source. The company first started using electricity supplied from sustainable sources at its Yokkaichi wallboard plant in April 2023. It intends to extend this to its other plants in the near future.

France: Etex subsidiary Siniat plans to install a new boiler, fired by either solid recovered fuel (SRF) or waste wood, at its Auneuil gypsum wallboard plant in Oise Department. The producer expects this to reduce the plant's gas consumption by 20%. The L'Usine Nouvelle newspaper has reported that the project is part of a planned Euro30m sustainability overhaul of equipment at the plant before 2026. Siniat recently brought the Auneuil plant back online following the installation of a new Euro15m dryer in early 2023, which increased wallboard drying times by 10% and reduced gas consumption by 20%. The producer said that this has eliminated 5900t/yr of CO₂ emissions.

From the remaining Euro3m of its allotted budget for sustainability upgrades, Siniat will build a gypsum recycling plant at the Auneuil gypsum wallboard plant. It currently receives its recycled gypsum from Ritleng Revalorisations' gypsum recycling plant in Rohr, Bas-Rhin Department. Currently, natural gypsum from the Le Pin-Villeparisis and Montmorency mines accounts for 40 - 60% of the Auneuil plant' gypsum consumption.