Volume 5 Issue 22

Purchase Puts PetroCard into Lubes

Washington State commercial fuels marketer PetroCard Systems announced last month that it has acquired Thunderbird Lubrications, one of the nations largest distributors of Pennzoil and Quaker State lubricants. Based in Spokane, Wash., Thunderbird was a division of Gull Industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. PetroCard, which is headquartered in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, said it was attracted by the opportunity to get into the lubes business while enlarging its fuels operati...

Honeywell Completes Wax Sell-off

The International Group Inc. has acquired Honeywells industrial wax business in the United States, the companies announced yesterday. The transaction completes Honeywells divestiture of global industrial wax operations, although the company remains in the lubricants market with its Specialty Additives business. The companies did not disclose terms of the sale, which includes a refinery in Smethport, Pa., with capacity to make 70,000 metric tons of bauxite wax per year. IGI said it made the acqu...

ExxonMobil Throws Weight into PAO

ExxonMobil Chemical recently completed an expansion that increased capacity to produce high-viscosity polyalphaolefins at its plant in Beaumont, Texas, by 20 percent. It marked the second capital improvement announced for the PAO plant in the past year. Officials said the company undertook the expansion to accommodate growing demand for high-viscosity PAOs in synthetic industrial and driveline lubricants. Through a series of process improvements and debottlenecks, weve extended manufacturing cap...

Shrinking Market Forecast for Russia

Russia is the worlds third-largest lubricant market, but a new study predicts it will begin shrinking within the next few years. The Moscow firm InfoTek-Consult concludes that the countrys demand for finished lubes will decline after 2007 as Russia updates aging vehicles and machinery. It will be a more difficult market, General Director Tamara Levanovna Kandelaki advised in a telephone interview Monday. It is true that demand will shift toward higher quality lubricants and that these have high...