Hydrodec this week will begin operating two of the six newly built production trains at its Canton, Ohio, transformer oil rerefinery, which had been shut since a December 2013 fire that debilitated its processing unit.
The London-headquartered transformer oil rerefiner Hydrodec Group Plc. said it will produce from its two new expansion trains after final instrument tuning this week, and finish building and testing its other four replacement trains, which will stream sequentially once the first two are running.
With all six lines, the plant will produce 40 million liters of transformer oil per year – around 10 million more than it did before the incident. Hydrodec said it expects to begin selling its naphthenic oil shortly after production starts, followed by transformer oils three to four weeks after that.
Hydrodec of North America expects to broaden its sales to a variety of new customers as well as reinitiate supply to most of our core customer base within a few months of start-up, the company said in a June 1 press release.
The commissioning of Canton is very important for Hydrodec; bringing the new plant online has progressed carefully to fully enable the additional operational and safety features designed into this upgrade and which we are confident will deliver at least 10 percent greater efficiency than the nameplate capacity of the original equipment, said CEO Ian Smale. Our new plant will be safer, easier to maintain and we are confident we can produce 40 million liters per annum of the best quality transformer oil available in the U.S.
Hydrodec has not specified a precise cause of the Dec. 1, 2013, incident, nor the amount of monetary damage, but confirmed that it has received $18.8 million from its insurers.
The Canton Fire Department told Lube Report on Dec. 4, 2013, that the incident resulted in approximately $12.5 million in physical damages, but a Hydrodec official told Lube Report that the physical damage was likely much higher.
The original 22,000-sqaure foot plant was completed in 2008 for around $17 million and had capacity to recycle around 8 million gallons of transformer oil per year. Described as hydrogenation-refined naphthenic mineral transformer oil, the companys rerefined product, branded as Superfine, uses a proprietary catalyst to remove impurities from recycled transformer oil. Hydrodec has key operations in the U.K., the U.S., and Australia.