It was a much more active week in Europe and the U.S., and even Asia has seen business start to pick up after the Chinese New Year holidays. U.S. Gulf There has been renewed shipping interest throughout the U.S., with all routes seeing better demand. The transatlantic eastbound route is registering a lot of enquiries to ship styrene to Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam and also into the Mediterranean. There has also been a fair amount of caustic fixed into both the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe, ...

U.S. refiners produced close to 60.4 million barrels of base oil in 2014, a 1 percent gain over 2013, according to data published Friday by the Energy Information Administration. Total U.S. output of base oils was 59.8 million barrels in 2013 and 57.5 million barrels in 2012, the EIA data show. Much of the gain for 2014 came from the 25,000 barrel per day API Group II plant opened by Chevron in Mississippi at mid-year – although that jolt of supply was tempered somewhat as other refiners r...

Birch Hill Equity Partners completed its purchase of Newalta Corp.s Industrial Division last week, including its rerefinery in North Vancouver, Canada. The Toronto-based private equity firm renamed the business Terrapure Environmental. A Terrapure official said the new ownership will probably decide at some point to expand the rerefinery, though he implied that is not likely under current market conditions, when margins for rerefined base stocks have largely disappeared. The North Vancouver rere...

Calumet Specialty Products Partners posted a net loss, Chemturas industrial performance products segments operating income remained unchanged, Clean Harbors made less money off rerefined and blended products, and Quaker Chemical reported a decline in net income, all for the fourth quarter, compared to the year-earlier quarter. Calumet Calumet Specialty Products Partners L.P. posted a net loss of $63.5 million, compared to a $15.5 million net loss in 2013s fourth quarter. For the full year 2014, ...

Lubricants producers in Africa say the fluctuation of the foreign exchange rate to U.S. dollars has mitigated the impact of declining base oil prices on finished lubricants. The exchange rate has an effect since all the raw materials are imported. This has had an effect on the delay in lubricant price decreases because the Kenyan shilling has depreciated to the U.S. dollar, said Richard Mugambi, lubricant sales manager for Gulf Energy Kenya. Irfan Khan, general manager for General Petroleum of T...

H&R Group yesterday said it patented a process to convert low-value oil refinery by-products into high-quality process oils and other specialties on an industrial scale. A pilot plant at one of the companys German base oil plants is using the process to turn residues such as bitumen into products such as naphthenic process oils and white oils. Never before has large-scale production been able to successfully produce an oil with a naphthenic base character from a residue of paraffin base orig...

BioAmber Inc. noted this week that its 30,000 metric ton per year succinic acid plant in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada – which it says will be the worlds largest – is on schedule for start-up in the third quarter of this year. Montreal-based BioAmber announced that it expects construction of its bio-based succinic acid plant to be completed in two months and commissioning – begun yesterday – to take around five months. BioAmber noted that the cost of the plant will remain withi...