Gen III Oil Corp. announced on Monday that it has contracted Koch Project Solutions to provide engineering, construction and licensed vendor teams for a planned API Group II+ and Group III rerefinery that would be located in the U.S. Gulf Coast region.
The Vancouver, Canada-based startup company is still working to select a site and obtain financing for the project.
“We engaged industrial and commercial [real estate agents] in the U.S. Gulf Coast last fall,” Gen III Executive Vice President of Corporate Finance Mark Redcliffe told Lube Report yesterday. “We have shortlisted a handful of sites, and due diligence and negotiations are ongoing.” The sites are in Texas and Louisiana, he added.
Last November Gen III claimed that an international oil company had signed a letter of intent to offtake the plant’s base oil, but it still has not identified the oil company.
Redcliffe said Gen III does not yet have an estimated start date for construction.
According to yesterday’s announcement, the rerefinery will have capacity to process 5,600 barrels per day of used motor oil. The company says that its ReGen process can produce up to 55% Group III and up to 25% Group II+ rerefined base oil, plus 20% of other byproducts such as water, asphalt extender and hydrotreated distillates. According to Redcliffe, the company estimates it would run the rerefinery 330 days per year, and expect to have annual base oil production capacity of roughly 1,400 b/d of Group II+ and 3,000 b/d of Group III.
The ReGen process was previously owned by a Canadian company called Verolube Inc., which in late 2013 announced plans to build Group II and III rerefineries in Alberta and in Houston, with construction expected as early as late 2014.
VeroLube’s projects didn’t come to fruition, and Gen III later acquired its technology.
The company said in this week’s press release that the U.S. Gulf Coast rerefinery is one of three North American projects.
In early 2018, Gen III signed a 20-year lease for a site in Bowden, Alberta, Canada, where it intends to build a rerefinery that can process 2,800 b/d of used motor oil to make 2,100 b/d of base oil.
At the time, the company anticipated building the rerefinery in summer 2018 and starting it up in 2019’s first quarter. “The Alberta project is still on the table subject to securing financing,” Redcliffe said yesterday. The company hasn’t yet disclosed details on the third project.