Expansion of 1000tpd white cement kiln and innovative clinker handling system: Naseer Siddiqui, Saudi White Cement (Saudi Arabia)
Filmed at Cemtech Europe 2015, 20-23 September, Intercontinental Hotel, Vienna, Austria.
Mr Chairman, for the introduction. Ok. My presentation today is consisting of two parts as he described, one is the optimization of the white cement kiln, and the other is the innovative clinker handling. We had lots of problems with clinker handling so we couldn't do it. So since [xx] I'll skip through, the details and try to do my best.
Thank you very much. OK, just a brief history of it. We are located near Riyadh, and we had 700 ton per day plant which was put up in 2001. It never did, it was done by Babcock. Babcock gave us excellent machinery, but over the years we discovered that Babcock machinery was although very excellent, our limestone was not.
So, I think one of the major reasons was because enough exploration and detail studies of the limestone strong quality at various part of quarries was not made. So, we undertook a survey. Then we discovered that our limestone exploitation method was incorrect. So we did some deep drilling and we discovered that as we went down, the limestone quality became better.
So what we did was that based on that, we discovered that had reserves of up to 40 to 50 years. So with these reserves, it was quite possible to put up another 1000 tons per day lime because the demand in the kiln was about 700,000 to 800,000 tons per year. So whereas our existing plant was just getting for about 250,000 tons.
It never came to its rated capacity, so we thought we would either put up a new 1000 ton per day lime. If the fuel restrain from Aramco was not there but in fact it came up that Aramco refused to give us extra fuel. So we thought we'll have limited expansion, and we will go from 700 tons per day to 1000 tons per day of clinker.
So, there was a tough competition of that. But I'll also give you some in the backdrop of this contract, which we have done with FCB of France. So we awarded the contract to FCB of France and the expanded plant was commissioned in March,2013. So, there is a certain backdrop we already discussed some things about the limestone quarry, and we worked over it and with selective mining.
And better knowledge of our quarry. So we succeeded in getting high quality limestone, very low in iron and it had all the components required. So, for aluminum oxide, which is a requirement of white cement, we purchased kaolin[sp?] from Morocco, which is very expensive then we'd tapped some resources in Saudi Arabia also, so we decided that we will use the Moroccan kaolin[sp?] as a sweetener only, whereas the local kaolin[sp?] will be used mostly you see.
So, it gave us most of the aluminum oxide. The Moroccan kaolin[sp?] was there because we wanted some alkalis to balance the alkaline-sulphur ratio, was very important. Otherwise we would choke our pre-heaters. So, this is the limestone quarry and then I talked about the expensive Moroccan kaolin which we have discontinued over the last year. We were paying about 550 Riyals per ton for this kaolin, rendered in Saudi Arabia, compared to that the kaolin which we are getting as sweetener is just 100 Riyal, so which is five fold difference.So I will just go to the, Ok, that's something about the new machinery, then we talked about it and setup how you are going to do that so I will just give you the basics what you did was, of course there is a new impact pressure.
Previously we had one pressure of 270 tons per hour so that was crushing kaolin, limestone and gypsum all the three things. So we decided that we should have another crusher of 200 ton which will be only for kaolin
