Thailand’s Largest Cement Maker Siam Cement Plans $3 Bn Investment in Renewables

The largest building materials player of Thailand – Siam Cement Group (SCG) – has now come up with a comprehensive investment plan for the coming five years. The key feature this time is that it has special focus on the environmental aspect of the businesses of SCG and the company looks to strive faster towards the employment of renewable energy to shift the present business style of SCG to a ‘circular’ one.

SCG has specifically announced in its investment plans that it will be investing 100 billion baht or $2.89 billion until 2027 end in venues like renewable energy. This will be in addition to the ongoing efforts by Siam Cement for decarbonisation of its chemicals businesses and main building materials.

The investment plan reveals that SCG is heading towards solar power generation and lithium-ion batteries manufacturing for electric vehicles. This is aimed at strengthening the position of SCG in manufacturing materials of the two sectors.

As far as the green electricity is concerned from the solar source, Siam wants to add 3,000 megawatts (MW) by 2027. This implies that the company wants to expand the solar power to almost 15 times from the present solar capacity.

The manufacturing of cement and petrochemical products by the very nature of current technologies and processes emit greenhouse gases in large amounts. SCG wants to adopt a circular business process that would have focus on recycling, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing such products that will have little or no environmental footprint. The present business structure of SCG is not likely to achieve sustainable growth.

Continuing efforts of SCG

The cement maker announced in March, 2022 that it wants to have 30 per cent of energy consumed to come from renewable sources of energy. Also, it has the ambition of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In September, SCG partnered with Nomura Research Institute of Japan to understand the carbon dioxide emissions from its distribution network. Subsequently, it invested in Rondo Energy to develop and expand the employment of Rondo’s Heat Battery (RHB) technology to enhance decarbonisation of its businesses.