Two years of the COVID-19 pandemic battered the base oils industry. Just as the market emerged from the gloom earlier in 2022 and looked like things were getting back to normal, the conflict in Ukraine prolonged the chaos. Lubes’n’Greases’ base stocks editor Gabriela Wheeler shares her perspectives on the seemingly never-ending base oil market uncertainty.
While Europe faces yet more economic and energy supply worries, buyers in India and China are snapping up cheap Russian crude and taking advantage of European base oil market uncertainty. Another lockdown in China has kept refining capacity underutilized and demand for base oil low.
Read more about sanctions on Russian exports in Boris Kamchev’s article.
