ATIEL, the technical association of the European lubricants industry, has announced new guidelines for base oil interchange of Group III base stocks. That’s good news for blenders, who faced a laundry list of costly tests when switching among base oils. ATIEL is the European equivalent of API and its Code of Practice is accepted industrywide as best practice for the development and manufacture of engine oils conforming to Europe’s ACEA Sequences. The ATIEL Code of Practice is essent...

Petroplus Holdings AG will suspend next years turnaround of its Petit Couronne, France, refinerys 7,300 barrels per day base oil plant, which may be shut down as part of a cost-cutting refinery reconfiguration. The Petit Couronne base oil plant has 6,300 b/d of API Group I capacity and 1,000 b/d of Group III capacity. The company informed refinery employees Oct. 20 it will begin a formal information and consultation process related to the reconfiguration, as required under French law, before t...

PC-11, the proposed upgrade for heavy-duty engine oils, has been given a green light for category development by the American Petroleum Institute’s Lubricants Group. The action was taken during the group’s meeting in Houston on Monday. The next step will be for the Diesel Engine Oil Advisory Panel (DEOAP) to establish a New Category Development Team, expected during the ASTM Committee D-2 meeting in New Orleans in early December. The need for PC-11 was first spelled out in June in ...

Calumet Specialty Products Partners third quarter sales increased dramatically compared to the year earlier quarter. For 2011s first nine months, independent lubricant blender Fuchs posted strong sales across all of its regions, compared to the same period last year. Calumet posted $19.6 million net income for the quarter ending Sept. 30, down 7.5 percent from $21.2 million net income in the year earlier period. The third quarter 2011 results include $20.3 million of noncash unrealized derivati...

Europe has lost many API Group I base oil plants in recent years. Now a Bulgarian partnership is working to bring one back from the grave. The new owners of the former Nova Plama refinery say they plan to resume fuels production next year and that the facility in Pleven, Bulgaria will begin again to make base stocks in 12 months. The partnership, Plama Refinery, says the plant will have capacity of 35,000 metric tons per year and that it will be upgraded to make Group III oils within two years....

Ashland subsidiary Hercules is selling its synthetic aviation and refrigerant lubricants business to Monument Chemicals. The price was not disclosed. The synthetic lubricants are polyol- and ester-based, and the annual revenue is about $50 million, according to Ashland. Under the asset purchase agreement announced yesterday, Indianapolis-based Monument Chemicals will obtain a 22-acre parcel in Louisiana, Mo., including a manufacturing facility which Monument plans to continue operating. The t...

Bit by bit, the U.S. market continues to tighten, and freights are stable-to-firm. European routes are fairly robust too, but freights have hardly altered over the past month. Asia is starting to see more business and a gradual tightening of space. U.S. Gulf of Mexico There is a gradual build-up of spot trade on almost every U.S. route, eating away at the pool of open tonnage in the region. Contractual demand is also rising as the year end approaches, with the likely result that freights from t...