BauMineral uses the silo capacities at the Wilhelmshaven site to temporarily store fly ash from the Maasvlakte power station in the Netherlands. This ensures the supply of customers in Northwest Germany.
The Maasvlakte power station in the Netherlands has been in operation more frequently since the end of 2021. This has also increased the production of fly ash, which is a by-product of power generation from hard coal. Fly ash is mainly used in the ready-mix concrete industry. But in cold weather, this only operates on a smaller scale, so sales for fly ash are lower in the winter months.
If the silos at a site were to be completely filled and there were no more storage facilities for the fly ash, the power station would have to be shut down in the worst case.
Therefore, alternatives for storing the fly ash from Maasvlakte had to be found at short notice. One solution was offered by the Wilhelmshaven site. The coal-fired power station there has been shut down since December 2021. This means that fly ash will no longer be produced, so that the storage facility with a free capacity of around 30,000 tons was available.
That is why, from January to April, approx. 8,400 tons of fly ash from Maasvlakte were transported by barge through the coastal canal to the port of Oldenburg, where they were loaded into trucks and further transported to Wilhelmshaven to be stored. Following the inspections carried out by the relevant authorities, the fly ash will now be delivered to customers in the ready-mix concrete and building materials industries in northwestern Lower Saxony. It will be used for the production of ready-mix concrete and concrete products.
Roy Ramon Scholz, responsible for sales in northern and eastern Germany at BauMineral: "In order to secure the needs of our customers, we have to develop increasingly flexible strategies to ensure that we can continue to supply our customers reliably, and we sometimes have to take unconventional routes. International cooperation between our power Stations was a way of contributing to this."
