Heartland Automotive Services Inc., the largest U.S. Jiffy Lube franchisee, issued a public apology and will pay $300,000 in fines after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor charges of discharging oil into the Austin, Texas, sewer system, the Travis County district attorney announced Thursday. The conviction on three counts of violating the Texas Water Code followed an investigation of a Heartland Jiffy Lube store on Burnet Road in Austin, Texas. In September 2007, members of the Texas Environm...

API CG-4 is headed for the graveyard of obsolete engine oils. The American Petroleum Institute’s Lubricants Committee has voted to discontinue licensing products against the diesel engine oil category, and effective Aug. 31, 2009, no products can claim they are licensed to the 14-year-old specification. After that date, products cannot be labeled with the CG-4 designation inside the trademarked API ‘donut’ service symbol. API encourages marketers instead to upgrade their oils ...

Calumet Shreveport LLC agreed to pay $230,000 to resolve Clean Air Act violations stemming from an Oct. 30, 2008, incident at its Midway Street Lubricants facility in Shreveport, La., the Environmental Protection Agency said last week. An accidental release and fire occurred Oct. 30 at the Calumets facilitys sour water tank while vacuum trucks were removing residual oil from an open manway. The three-alarm fire produced thick black smoke for two hours. It did not impact base oil production at t...

Risk of an engine fire from leaking motor oil this week prompted General Motors to recall a total of nearly 1.5 million model year 1997 to 2003 Buicks, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs. Drops of engine oil may be deposited on the exhaust manifold through hard braking, GM advised the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on April 8. If the manifold is hot enough and the oil runs below the heat shield, it could ignite into a small flame and spread to the plastic spark plug wire chan...

A reactor used for making lubricants exploded Sunday evening at a SantoLubes plant in St. Charles, Mo., injuring an employee and starting a two-alarm blaze that gutted the building before firefighters extinguished it more than two hours later. According to a report yesterday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, SantoLubes employee Robert Exner was mixing ferric chloride and 1,2-methyldioxybenzene in a large tank Sunday when it exploded at 9:54 p.m. SantoLubes owner George Garrison told the Post-Disp...

Tri-County Petroleum Inc. has acquired the automotive division of Loos and Dilworth Inc. and Loos and Dilworth Co. from shareholders Rick Campbell and Gregg Draper. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Loos and Dilworths automotive division distributes Valvoline, 76 Lubricants and ConocoPhillips brand lubricants, including motor oils, transmission fluids, hydraulic oil, greases and gear oil. Denver-based private equity firm KRG Capital Partners owns Tri-County Petroleum Inc., a Pennsylv...

WD-40 Co. on April 7 reported net income of $4.1 million for its second quarter ending Feb. 28, down 52.9 percent from the same quarter in 2008. Earnings per share were 25 cents per diluted share in the second quarter, compared to 51 cents per share for the year-earlier quarter. San Diego-based WD-40s fiscal year goes from Sept. 1 to Aug. 31. WD-40 overall reported net sales of $61.8 million for the second quarter, down 21.7 percent from the same quarter in 2008. Second quarter sales in the A...

It has been another week of intense activity on routes into Asia from Europe, the United States and Middle East, and freights have climbed even higher. The magnitude of material being shipped however has caused some debate as to how much longer this can continue. We have some charterers who indicate that their customers in China are satiated and will not need further imports in May. Others too suggest that unless the export of finished goods from China to the West picks up then further imports...