Universal Environmental Services has acquired The McPherson Cos. used oil collection business and has begun construction of a rerefinery in Georgia. Earlier this year, Avista Oil AG of Germany acquired a 50 percent stake in Universal Environmental Services LLC, enabling Universal to grow its used oil collection business and plan a base oil rerefinery in Peachtree City, Ga. Plans called for a plant that would process 30 million gallons of waste oil per year and be capable of producing API Group ...

API Group I will shrink from 60 percent of the global base oil market in 2010 to 43 percent by 2020, according to Kline & Co., displaced by Groups II/II+ and Group III. Speaking at the ACI 2011 European Base Oils and Lubricants conference held in Krakow last week, Geeta Agashe, vice president of Kline & Co.s energy research practice in Parsippany, N.J., said that the current Group I surplus should soon turn into huge deficit because demand continues to recover from the recession, and ...

ExxonMobil Basestocks chose energy conglomerate Cosan as its distributor in Brazil and Quality Logistic Services Australia as its distributor in Australia. ExxonMobil has given Cosan and QLSA full distribution rights in Brazil and Australia, respectively, for the companys API Group I Core and Group II EHC products. Collaborating with these best-in-class channel partners will maintain and enhance our reach in key base stock markets and will enable customers to more easily access ExxonMobils Core...

Quaker Chemical acquired G.W. Smith & Sons Inc., which manufactures and distributes die casting and other metalworking fluids. Terms of the transaction, which included Dayton, Ohio-based G.W. Smiths commercial operations and a manufacturing plant in Dayton, were not disclosed. The companys proprietary formulations are sold through direct sales, distributors and agents in the U.S. and internationally. Joseph Berquist, vice president and managing director for Quaker North America, noted tha...

Boric acid is now listed in Europe as a substance of very high concern, and metalworking fluid manufacturers, with no obvious direct replacement, are facing pressure to supply boron-free products. Robert Stubbs of Sea-Land Chemical Europe gave an update on boric acid, a popular metalworking fluid component, at the UEIL Symposium on Metal Removal Fluids in Barcelona on Sept. 17. Fluid formulators turned to boric acid in the 1980s as a replacement, in semisynthetic fluids, for corrosion inhibito...

A defective oil pump led Yamaha to recall 2,300 model year 2009 to 2011 motorcycles. The recall includes several variants of VMX17 (V-Max) motorcycles manufactured in Japan from September 2008 through April 2011, which were distributed in the United States by Yamaha Motor Corp., U.S.A. In affected motorcycles, abnormally high oil pressure can build up inside the oil pump, Yamaha stated in its Sept. 26 letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This pressure can force the thr...