Gypsum industry news

Canada: France-based Saint-Gobain has inaugurated its CertainTeed gypsum wallboard plant in Sainte-Catherine, near Montreal. The unit is fully electrified and powered by hydroelectricity. The company says that the site is the first zero-carbon (scope 1 and 2) wallboard plant in North America and the largest in the world to be fully powered by electricity. The launch of a new production line at the existing plant, along with equipment modernisation, has enabled a 40% increase in production capacity while reducing energy consumption by 30% and CO₂ emissions by approximately 44,000t/yr.

Mark Rayfield, CEO Saint-Gobain North America said “This ambitious project strengthens our leadership position in light construction in Canada and meets the strong local demand for sustainable solutions. It accelerates our growth in the country, where we have tripled in size in three years.”

The upgraded wallboard plant is the group’s second after the one in Fredrikstad, Norway that was inaugurated in 2023.

Finland: Knauf Oy is preparing to electrify the calcination process at its Kankaanpää gypsum wallboard plant. An electrified hybrid dryer was installed at the site in 2024. Now, four new 2MW heaters is scheduled to be added in the summer of 2026. The cost of the project will be around €5m. Knauf recently released its new LOWR product line, where boards are dried with an electrified plasterboard dryer using 100% renewable electricity.

Canada: Saint-Gobain subsidiary CertainTeed has concluded a year-long trial to increase the efficiency of CertainTeed 5/8 Type X gypsum wallboard production at its Winnipeg plant through recipe optimisation and technology upgrades. The producer adjusted its water-to-stucco ratio and replaced the line’s existing magnetic flow meters with Coriolis flow meters. It cut water usage by 1.09 million litres (3%), energy consumption by 25,000MWhr and CO₂ emissions by 5.6t year-on-year, while also increasing productivity by 5% year-on-year.

The producer now plans to roll out other water management initiatives based on the case study of the Winnipeg plant across its plants in Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Ukraine: Knauf Gips Ukraine has bought guarantees of origin for its electricity through Ukraine’s National Electronic Register. The guarantees confirm the sources of the company’s energy in Ukraine. Newsbase Daily News has reported that this will form the basis for future development of the country’s renewable energy market. Ukrainian authorities have previously attempted two green energy auctions, both of which failed due to investor concerns over the guaranteed buyers’ financial obligations and regulatory instability.

Power provider Elementum Energy Manager Olga Rybachuk said “The first investors in new projects will be those already in the market and familiar with the risks. Newcomers rely on their assessments. Green auctions are an important tool, but credit risk remains a critical factor.”

France: Saint-Gobain Placo has installed a heat and water recovery system in its Val-de-Cognac gypsum wallboard plant. In a post to LinkedIn, the company said that the new system has reduced the plant’s CO₂ emissions by 14%, its energy consumption by 11% and its water consumption by 10% compared to 2019 levels.

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.