Cookstown cement plant gets £6m upgrade

After acquiring Lafarge Ireland in 2022, Cookstown Cement rebranded to Cemcor following investment from the new local ownership.

Cemcor is the trading brand; legally the corporate entity is called Cookstown Cement., It is majority owned by LCC Group, is majority owned by Daniel and Michael Loughran. Managing director David Millar has a minority stake. LCC, originally Lissan Coil Company, also owns petrol stations and an oil distribution business.

Immediately after the purchase of Cookstown Works completed, Cemcor committed £6m to replace the electro-static precipitators (ESPs) with a state-of-the-art bag filter at the plant.

Within 14 months from final design agreement in March 2022, the new bag filter was commissioned and operational by May 2023. This investment project is centred around the abatement filter, with the filter separated into four quadrants with 22 rows per quadrant, 14 bags per row and a total of 1,232 bags. Within the new filtration, there is a system that detects and locates damaged bags. This system will isolate the cleaning operations to a specific row and, if the damage is minor, reseal with process dust. If the bag is severely damaged, the bag filter can isolate the entire section and maintenance can be carried out remotely.

It has also installed a dust particulate conveying system at the Cookstown plant, transporting captured dust to a silo via a new batch weighing feeder where it will be recycled through the cement manufacturing process, so no material goes to waste.

A new reaction tower controls emissions of sulphur dioxide. Process gases are now directed from the kiln system through the filter prior to clean gases being released via the stack due to the instalment of a new 750KW main process fan.

Managing director David Millar said: “We are delighted with the huge leaps forward Cemcor has made with regards sustainability and efficiency upgrades since the acquisition last year.

“The plant itself looks and operates at an extremely high standard, which is a credit to the whole team involved in these projects. We are forward thinking at Cemcor and understand it was time to put our money on the line and invest in the plants efficiencies and sustainable outputs, to protect the environment around us and futureproof the plant itself.”

Cemcor has also invested in its packing systems. In addition to high-tech hardware upgrades such as filling frames, spouts and weighers on the packer itself, improvements to the PLCs on the packer and palletiser systems have improved reliability and consistency as well as improving the ease of operations through a new touchscreen operating system with built-in diagnostics and remote support access.

Next up is replacing the existing manual pallet wrapping process with automated stretch hood equipment, planned for later this year.

Cemcor is also investing in new laboratory equipment to improve the speed and accuracy of the raw feed analysis, including online monitoring and new handling facilities for alternative raw materials including biogenic carbonates, it says.

Got a story? Email news@theconstructionindex.co.uk