The market out of the U.S. Gulf had a disappointing week during which little materialised. European trades were slow, as was the market within Asia. U.S. Gulf Rates from the U.S. Gulf have hardly changed, signifying that demand did not ultimately increase as much over the last week as owners had been expecting. The clear winner has got to be the U.S. Gulf to east coast of South America route, since demand has been strong enough to bump freights up for 5,000 ton parcels from Houston to Santos i...

Transformer oil rerefiner Hydrodec has reached agreement with its U.S. partner, transformer recovery firm G&S Technologies Group, to expand capacity at its rerefinery in Canton, Ohio, from four trains to six, in 2014, company officials said at its annual general meeting Monday. Work on engineering design, permitting and a contracting strategy has already begun, Hydrodec Chairman Lord Moynihan said in a company statement. We would expand this expanded capacity to be commissioned in the summ...

Amet Packaging Inc. has acquired assets of Oden Corp., adding to its pool of packaging companies and extending its reach into the lubes and greases packaging market. Packaging companies Change Parts and E-Pak Machinery – both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Michigan-based Amet Packaging – announced yesterday that they have acquired Crandall International and Niagara Pump from Oden to form the entity called Oden Machinery, Inc. Oden Machinery, Inc. offers patented filling, blending and...

MUMBAI, India – Indias logistics industry is highly unorganized and fragmented, and costs are high, posing challenges for the worlds third largest lubricants market. Logistics is Indias second largest employer, after agriculture, with 25 million people, but it lacks focus, Vivek Arya, managing director of Rhenus Prolog Logistics, told the ICIS Indian Base Oils & Lubricants Conference here in late April. Most truck owners own one or two trucks. There are 160,000 trucking companies. I...

Mag Lubricants new 60,000 tons per year blending plant in Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates, is fully operational following a $50 million investment from Abu Dhabi-based parent company Mag Group. The 30,000 square meter facility in Jebel Ali’s greater industrial zone was an 18-month-long project that has been in the companys expansion plans for some time, CEO Mahmoud-Al-Theraawi noted in a recent press release. The new facility is strategically placed near the trading ports, allowing us to...

MOSCOW – Rosneft has increased capacity at its Novokuibyshevsk lubricants blending plant to 340,000 metric tons per year, making it one of the largest in Europe, industry sources confirmed at an energy meeting last month. The blending plant upgrade technology is developed by I.S.T Molchtechnik, a German engineering and design company, the meeting heard last month. We installed our technology in Novokuibyshevsk in two phases, Eduard Graf told Global Business Clubs CIS Fuels and Lubricants ...

For the first time ever, world base oil refining capacity has topped the 1 million barrel per day mark. In another first, API Group I base oils slipped to less than half of the global total. Those are just two of the insights that can be gleaned from Lubes’n’Greases magazine’s 2013 Guide to Global Base Oil Refining. Published this month, the Guide lists more than 160 base oil refineries worldwide, identifying their owners, sites and capacities in barrels per day. The informati...