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basskisser

wrote:
On 16 Jan 2007 10:54:03 -0800, "basskisser"
wrote:

Actually there's a lot of concrete used here, just not for residential
construction. I honestly don't know what drives the prices, they
fluctuate quite a lot around here from month to month, and there really
doesn't seem to be any correlation to fuel prices, etc.

The story we are getting from Cemex/Krehling is that China used to
export Portland and drove the price down to the point that a lot of
domestic (US) companies shut down their plants. Environmentalists were
pleased because a lot of these plants were burning tires in a fairly
dirty reactor. China is now using all of their production themselves
in things like that huge dam they are building and importing some so
the market has flipped. The US producers are not able to restart
their "dirty" plants so they need to spend more money for cleaner
reactors. In the long run this may be a good thing but in the short
term portland prices are up. Locally we just built a big airport
expansion that sucked the concrete plants dry and there is a whole lot
of commercial building going on. Housing has slowed down but they are
still building. Local demand is still high.

I've heard that China is now the largest user of Portland Cement in the
world. A lot of the large industrial type buildings being built around
the southest for automotive plants usually set up a batch plant
on-site. That's good and bad, because of quality control.