The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Friday approved Shell Oil Co.s proposal to sell its 50-percent stake in the Excel Paralubes base oil refinery to Flint Hills Resources LP. The trustee in charge of that stake said the sale is expected to close by tomorrow. Completion of the sale would allow Shell to fulfill the most significant condition of its acquisition last year of Pennzoil-Quaker State Co. and would introduce a new supplier to the U.S. base oil market. Lubricant blenders are crossing th...

Quaker Chemical Corp. announced Monday that it has purchased Eural S.r.l., an Italian manufacturer of specialty metalworking fluids. Quaker officials said the Conshohocken, Pa., company will use the acquisition to broaden the range of products it markets. Eural has carved out a meaningful position in the Italian metalworking lubricants market, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Naples said. Its products and technology are very complementary to our own and will, therefore, not only st...

Shell International Gas Ltd. recently debottlenecked its gas-to-liquids plant in Bintulu, Malaysia, increasing production of the feedstock it uses to make GTL base stocks. The 10-year-old plant, the worlds second-largest natural gas-to-liquids refinery, had daily capacity to make 12,500 barrels of oil products – approximately 10 percent being a waxy raffinate used as feedstock for high-quality base stocks. The debottlenecking, completed in May, increased capacity by 20 percent, according t...

ExxonMobil Corp. last week announced a five-year technology alliance with Symyx Technologies Inc., aimed at speeding the oil giants search for new catalysts for production of fuels, chemicals and base oils. The agreement calls for ExxonMobil to use Symyx tools to implement high throughput experimentation – a practice that speeds the process of producing and considering potential catalysts. According to the companies, Symyxs technologies allow researchers to generate hundreds of unique mate...