It’s official: The American Petroleum Institute ballot for the ILSAC GF-5 passenger car engine oil specification has closed, with a tally of votes in favor of the upgrade. Products meeting GF-5 will be licensed beginning Oct. 1, and can start displaying the Starburst logo on their labels that day. API’s Lubricants Committee now must quickly hammer out the wording for the API SN engine oil categories. In telephone conference calls Dec. 14 and 18, the committee continued its work to...

Under California legislation kicking in next month, the state will require that direct truck shipments of used oil to out-of-state facilities meet California testing standards and will pay rerefiners a direct incentive starting in 2013. Opponents have cried foul. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed the California Oil Recycling Enhancement Act (Bill SB 546) into law on Oct. 11. Aside from a rerefining incentive of 2 cents per gallon that begins in January 2013, the bill goes into effect on Ja...

An explosion earlier this month at Angarsk Petrochemical Co. plant in Russia killed one worker and knocked out a facility that produces base oils for hydraulic fluids, said parent company Rosneft. The Russian Prosecutors Investigative Committee, which is investigating the incident, has instituted criminal proceedings over the explosion as a violation of safety rules, official state news agency ITAR-TASS reported Dec. 7. The companys base oil plant in Angarsk has 5,750 barrels per day of API Grou...

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Brazil is a huge country with a healthy appetite for lubricants, consuming more than 1.3 million cubic meters (about 1.18 million metric tons) in 2008. While the market may shrink about 3 percent in 2009, expect demand to grow 2 to 3 percent annually from 2011 to 2020, a Petrobras official told the ICIS conference here. Flvio S. Gusmo Lima, an automotive lubricants specialist with Petrobras Distribuidora in Rio de Janeiro, gave an overview of the Brazilian lubricants m...

Failure to grease key air brake assembly parts has led to a truck recall by Ford. The recall beginning this month affects 231 model year 2010 F650 and F750 commercial trucks built by Ford joint venture Blue Diamonds assembly plant in Escobedo, Mexico, from July 13, 2009, through Sept. 8, 2009. The trucks are typically used for towing, heavy hauling and construction. In its Dec. 7 letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ford said its new supplier for front and rear axle as...

The Toronto Transit Commission awarded Safety-Kleen Canada Inc. a three year contract to recover and rerefine 600,000 liters (U.S. 159,000 gallons) of used lubricants generated annually by the commissions fleet. Terms of the contract announced last week were not disclosed. Since 1989, the agencys fleet has used between 500,000 and 740,000 liters of Safety-Kleens rerefined lubricants annually. The interesting thing in this announcement is that we have been supplying lubricants to the Toronto Tra...