Port-Daniel-Gascons is a deepwater export plant. Most of what it makes leaves by ship, and a good share of it lands in the U.S. Northeast. So when McInnis Cement changes what it burns, the buyers who care are not all Canadian.
The company told its local community on Sept. 18 that it will raise the alternative-fuel substitution rate at the plant to 20 percent by 2030, with a longer-term target of replacing up to 70 percent of the fossil fuel it currently burns. Today that fuel is petcoke.
What 20 percent substitution takes on the ground
Fuel substitution sounds like a procurement decision and is mostly a materials-handling project. The plant needs new on-site shredding equipment, drying capacity and enclosed storage before it can feed anything but petcoke into the kiln at a stable rate. Alternative fuels arrive wet, vary in calorific value load to load, and have to be conditioned to something the burner can take without upsetting the flame.
McInnis says a high share of the substitute will be biogenic, drawn from forest residues, which is the sensible feedstock in that part of Quebec. Operations director Philippe Marceau framed it as reducing the plant’s carbon footprint. That quote, the 20 percent figure, the 70 percent aspiration and the equipment list are all the company’s; Global Cement reported the presentation, and there is no third-party verification and no published capital cost.
The fuel half of the cement problem
Worth keeping the arithmetic straight. Fuel is roughly 40 percent of cement’s CO2. The rest comes out of the limestone during calcination and doesn’t care what you burn. A plant that hits 70 percent substitution with biogenic fuel has done real work on the fuel share and has not touched the process share at all.
Which is why the two decarbonization strategies in cement are not alternatives. They’re sequential. Fuel substitution is the cheaper, faster, lower-risk move that most plants can do with handling equipment and a permit. Process emissions need capture.
Heidelberg Materials is running the other half at its Padeswood works in Flintshire, where a full-scale post-combustion capture plant is being retrofitted onto a live 1949 kiln line for about 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, roughly 95 percent of site emissions. That project also burns waste-derived fuels, which is what gives it net-sink potential once the capture plant runs.
For buyers in the Northeast
Nothing changes on price or spec from this announcement, and 2030 is four years out. What it signals is that a plant with export exposure to U.S. markets is positioning ahead of whatever embodied-carbon procurement rules those markets adopt. Specifiers writing low-carbon cement requirements for 2029 and 2030 work should know which suppliers are moving now.