Dalmia Cement is asking the government for 2 million hectares of wasteland for the company to plant bamboo trees.

“The bamboo would be used as a replacement to fossil fuel in the manufacture of cement,” said the company’s Managing Director and CEO, Mahendra Singhi.

Speaking to BusinessLine on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference here today, Singhi said that Dalmia Cement would invest ₹10,000 crore in capacity expansion, taking the capacity from 33 million tonnes to 50 million tonnes by 2023-24. By 2031, 100 per cent of the cement it would produce would be “low carbon cement”. The bamboo plantation is to aid this transition, he said.

Carbon offsets

Singhi said that Dalmia Cement is in talks with two companies — Carbon Clean Solutions of the UK and Aler Solutions of Norway — for technology for ‘carbon capture and utilisation’. In August the ADB, after a study, had reported that the company’s plan to implement a 5 lakh tonne per annum CCU project at its plant in Ariyalur, Tamil Nadu, was viable. Dalmia Cement is in talks with some companies, including Unilever, to utilise the carbon dioxide from its plants, Singhi said.

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The company is seeking carbon offsets for its green measures, as its CCU programme would call for investments of ₹3,000-crore (not included in the ₹10,000-crore expansion outlay).

“CCU is the climate vaccine,” he said.

Green cement production

Singhi said that the company was already the “world’s greenest cement producer” with an unmatched carbon footprint of 492 kg per tonne of cement produced compared with the global average of 750–800 kg. In the last two years, the company was able to reduce its fossil fuel consumption by 16 percent, he added.

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Dalmia Cement is a member of the recently-formed First Movers Coalition, a group of companies that have agreed to by low-carbon products, even if they are more expensive. These products could be anything from electric vehicles to low carbon steel.

It has adopted ‘science-based targets’ (alignment of its greening measures with the global warming limiting targets), is part of RE100 (companies that have avowed to use 100 per cent renewable energy by a self-specified date) and practices ‘internal carbon pricing’ (adding the price of carbon emitted as one of the items of cost).