Change is about to come – Are you ready?
Burning clinker – have you ever wondered why we refer to “burning” when we talk about the high temperature process of clinker sintering? In strict physical terms “burning clinker” is of course not correct, because neither the decarbonization nor the sintering process involves any form of oxidization of any of the components of the raw material. Still everybody talks about “burning clinker”! The reason for this incorrectness is, that we are not (yet) able to create a high temperature field which is appropriate for that mineral transformation without combusting fuel. No doubt: in the cement industry we are depending on combustion for our manufacturing processes.
And when we look around, we recognize: we are not alone! Everywhere you look, almost all industrial high-energy-demanding processes are relying on combustion. If you dig still deeper, you’ll find out that our whole wealth has been built on combustion from the building materials we use till the consumer goods and food we eat! What an exciting invention was fire!!!
Now we are living in a historical phase of humanity – we are the generations to witness the substitution of combustion by direct electric energy conversion. You don’t believe it? It will happen, no matter how fierce the retention forces of clinging on to what we have held so dear over thousands of years. There is no other option and at the same time there is so much to gain: clean air, less pollutant induced illness, increase of primary energy efficiency in motorcars from 30-ish % to 80-ish %, and and and… Sure: The switchover to electrically produced cement is surely not yet in sight – but many are working on it already. And of course, in order to materialize that, we will need green and renewable energy – it all goes hand in hand. We should just not get lost in focusing on old technologies which will inevitably fade out. We should rather think entrepreneurial and understand this to be an opening space for new ideas and new business!
Electrically yours,
Matthias Mersmann
