Volume 15 Issue 36

SSY Base Oil Shipping Report

Parts of Europe have cooled substantially and certain trade lanes in Asia are fragile. U.S. markets are mostly robust, although there have even been a few cracks starting to appear there. Americas The styrene mania on routes to Europe is over (for now at least), leaving a couple of September ships with some work to do to fill out. Rates for 5,000-ton parcels from Houston to Rotterdam will probably have slipped from the peaks of low $80s per metric ton, which were concluded only last week. Althou...

Forecast Sees Slow Ramp-up in Demand

Global lubricant demand – including process oil and marine engine oil – is projected to grow about 1.5 percent per year to 42 million tons by 2019, up from just over 39 million tons in 2014, according to consultancy Kline & Co. George Morvey, industry manager for Klines Energy Practice, said during a webinar yesterday that Shell remained the top global supplier of finished lubricants last year, followed by ExxonMobil, BP, Total, Chevron, PetroChina, Sinopec, Idemitsu, JX Holding...

Base Oil Hits 7-year Peak

U.S. output of lubricant base oils rose 10 percent in the first six months of this year, versus the same period a year earlier, according to data released last week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In all, refinery net production of base oils totaled 31.8 million barrels from January to June 2015, versus 28.9 million barrels for January-June 2014, as refiners energetically cranked out their highest first-half volumes since the 2009 recession. Paraffinic base oils accounted for 86 p...

Prista Is Hot for Cold Blending

Bulgarian lube maker Prista Oil is upgrading the blending technology at its Ruse lubricants blending plant in Bulgaria, and hopes to persuade others to do likewise. In the first phase of the upgrade, performed in June, the plants capacity of 110,000 metric tons per year was increased by 5,000 t/y. The companys management expects additional capacity in the near future. Our rationale was not so much to increase the plants capacity but rather to test and implement a new blending technology that giv...

Yearly Sales Up for Quick Lubes

U.S. quick lubes average yearly sales per store rose to $694,189 this year, up 1.6 percent from 2014, National Oil & Lube News reported. The 2015 Fast Lube Operators Survey compiled data from 3,282 facilities in all 50 U.S. states, examining quick lubes operations, prices, demographics, employees, sales, products and services. The percentage of annual sales comprised solely of oil change services reached 79 percent. The average cost of goods reported for a standard, full service lube oil an...

Briefly Noted

Metalworking fluids maker Houghton International appointed Marcello Boldrini as its senior vice president and president of global metals, leading its specialty product lines for major metal industries. Lambent Technologies – which manufactures and supplies oleochemical derivatives for lubricant and metalworking formulations – and Petroferm officially changed their names to Vantage Specialties Inc.