Calcium Carbide: Dancing with Energy Saving   

By Sun Weishan  Chairman in China Calcium Carbide Industry Association

The year 2010 was a tough period for China's calcium carbide industry which was traditionally considered to be a high energy cost and overmuch emission industry. In order to improve production efficiency, the related departments in China have made great efforts by promoting policies in the past year, in terms of commercial power limitation and capacity control, and each of them seems to be specially "designed" for calcium carbide industry which has strongly energy dependence under its current processing method. However, China's calcium carbide producers have done a fairly good job in 2010 producing totally 15 million tons of calcium carbide that was relatively sufficient for downstream industries' demand, although the amount was just 0.2% less than in 2009.

Output

It shows China's calcium carbide output in the first six months of 2010 was 8.1073 million tons, up 20% comparing with 2009 including highest 1.419 million tons in March. The increasing tendency was believed to be contributed by high operating rate and the entire industry broke through the difficult position made by global financial crisis.
    After the promoting of policies mentioned above, nearly half of China's calcium carbide factories had to shut down or half-stop, obviously it had a direct impact to production. The downturn dominated the whole industry, then which just 6.5556 million tons of calcium carbide been made in the second half of 2010 with 23.5% less than that in 2009 including lowest 998 600 tons in November. Fig 1 below presents the detail.

Production regions

In 2010, domestic calcium carbide production continued to move toward west China. According to statistics, it had 10.25 million tons of calcium carbide made by producers located in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Ningxia Regions, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, occupying 67.4% of total output.

Consumption

Most of China's calcium carbide production in 2010 was consumed in domestic market. Data from customs show only 140 000 tons of calcium carbide had been transported to overseas in 2010, that below 1% of total domestic production. Respectively, approximately 80% of domestic calcium carbide was used for PVC (polyvinyl chloride) production, taking over 1.18 million tons of calcium carbide for 8 million tons of PVC.

Price

Price of calcium carbide remained at high level in 2010, especially in the second half the promotion of policies regarding to energy limited the supply of calcium carbide, and the highest point of price appeared in November that the time of supply shortage.

Capacity control

The policies promoted by related authorities was aimed to shut down the calcium carbide plant that couldn't meet the standard of "energy saving and emission reduction". In the past year, it had nearly 744 000 tons of calcium carbide capacity been removed from operation, thus amounted to 257 calcium carbide plants had been required to stop in the past five years, adding up to capacity in 3.05 million tons. Table 1 shows the details.
Table 1 The eliminated capacity of China's calcium carbide in 2010 (kt/a)
Year    Eliminated Capacity    Sum of eliminated plant    Sum of related factories
2006    574.2    91    83
2007    221.4    22    20
2008    1047.6    66    48
2009    466.8    31    28
2010    744.7    47    39
Total    3054.7    257    218
Source: CCR

Prospective

It still has a lot of work about energy saving for current calcium carbide producers to do in the next five years. Regarding to Chinese "Twelfth Five-Year Proving", it requires all the industrial producers must be aware of energy saving and environmental protection before thinking about profit and output. In this circumstance, calcium carbide producers should pay more attention to innovations. Alternatively, improving energy management levels would the other option for producers.