Ashland will sell its global distribution business – whose products include lubricant and elastomer additives and metalworking fluids – to TPG Capital for $930 million. The transaction is expected to close prior to the end of 2011s first quarter. The Ashland Distribution business distributes chemicals, solvents and raw materials used in industrial and industrial-grade applications. With annual revenues of $3.4 billion, it has about 2,000 employees across North America and Europe, an...

Houghton International on Thursday said it signed an agreement to acquire Shells metalworking and metal rolling oils business. Expected to close in early 2011, terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The decision was made to exit the metalworking and metal rolling lubricants business following a comprehensive strategic review, a Shell spokesperson told Lube Report. This strategy fits with our drive to simplify our global downstream portfolio, concentrating our footprint and focusing on sel...

Backed by private equity firm AEA Investors LP, four distributors in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast regions have joined to form RelaDyne, primarily offering lubricants and diesel exhaust fluids along with services to improve equipment reliability. The four are Mid-Town Petroleum Inc. (Bridgeview, Ill.), Oil Distributing Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio), The Hurt Co. Inc. (Houston) and Pumpelly Oil Co. (Suphur, La.). They all believed in what we were trying to do, RelaDyne CEO Larry Stoddard told Lube Re...

Chemtura last week completed financial restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in both the United States and Canada. Its listing returned to the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The company and 26 of its U.S. affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2009, citing significant decreases in liquidity and cash flow due to a market decline in order volumes in the preceding months because of the global economic recession. The company recorded an operating loss of...

IPAC last week announced its entry into the Asia, Middle East and Africa markets, doing business from an office and warehousing in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. International Petroleum Products and Additives Co. is a lubricant and fuel additive and component manufacturing and sales company based in Dublin, Calif. It manufactures in Illinois, Louisiana, Texas and California. We have analyzed this market for many years and with the ever-growing world demand for automotive, industrial and marine l...

MOSCOW – LukOil is confident that Russias lubricants market is rebounding in 2010 as the economy recovers from the financial downturn, but the industry faces impending problems. The country is expecting growth in almost every macro-economic sector, Maxim Donde, general director of LLK-International, told the Lubricants Russia 2010 conference last week. The fastest rate of growth is observed in lubricants-demanding industries such as machine-building and processing, and in all types of au...

Space looks set to remain tight out of the U.S. Gulf for November. European coastal markets are slow, but a few more deep-sea opportunities have arisen. Asia is fairly active, both domestically and on long-haul business. U.S. Gulf of Mexico Caribbean activity was boosted by numerous small cargoes of clean petroleum looking to ship from the Gulf to the Caribbean and intra-Caribbean, intertwined with small parcels of MTBE, styrene, vegetable oil and tallow. If the level of bookings carries on in...