Allegheny Petroleum Products last week opened a blending plant in Houston that will initially produce fuel additives and soon industrial lubricants.
Barbara Kudis, vice president of the Wilmerding, Pa.-based company, said it purchased the land earlier this month and has employees in place, getting a new plant up and running. Terms were not disclosed. While theres a variety of different options we couldve taken, we found a facility at a decent price and that had some usable equipment already there, she said. Allegheny installed additional equipment and is installing bigger tanks at the site.
The Houston blending plant now has production capacity of about 3 million or 4 million gallons per year, Kudis said, and is expected to reach about 7 million or 8 million gal/y by the end of 2015.
Our first orders will go out some time in the next week, Kudis told Lube Report yesterday. That should get up and running and be pretty busy fairly quickly. Between the fuel additive customers that wanted us to support that area, and industrial lubricants customers, there was enough demand that we needed to be down there.
The main demand right now is for fuel additives, she said, and the Houston location will help the company establish more of a global presence.
Allegheny also plans to blend industrial lubricants at the Houston plant. We have a lot of industrial customers, Kudis said. We have a fluid management program where we go and support a lot of our heavy manufacturing customers in their plants, and we often use other companies to help us support that. Now well have our own presence, and that will give us some benefit logistically, with the supply chain being in that region for the industrial side too.
Eventually the company will likely be able to make everything it makes in Pennsylvania at its Houston plant, she said.
Alleghenys products include automotive and industrial lubricants, metalworking fluids, greases, lubricant additives and fuel additives.