April 16, 2019
Volume 2 Issue 16
Tatneft to Open New Lube Blending Plant
Tatneft plans to open a 200,000 tons per year lubricants blending plant at its Taneco refinery site in Nizhnekamsk, Russia, according to the company’s top officials.
The plant should start operating in June, and the facility would cost less than 1 billion rubles (U.S. $15.5 million), Nail Maganov, head of the Tatarstan company, said in an April 3 report by Tatarstan’s Business Online news portal.
Photo courtesy of Taneco
The Taneco refinery site in Nizhnekamsk, Russia, where parent company Tatneft plans to remodel an existing facility into a lubricants blending plant.
Tatneft’s press department confirmed to Lube Report that the company’s top management intends to start its own lube production but declined to disclose when the plant’s construction will be completed and what slate of products it will produce.
“We have already given a facility that is ready to be remodeled [to a blending plant]. The technical details for the plant are prepared,” said Leonid Alekhin, Taneco’s general director. He added that in the future the company plans to expand the plant’s capacity.
The company’s officials revealed this idea after the sale last year of the assets of Tatneft-Nizhnekamskneftekhim-Oil, a 75-25 joint venture that the oil major shared with the chemicals company Nizhnekamskneftekhim. The JV owned and operated a 10,000 t/y polyalphaolefin plant and a lubricants blending plant, which were both sold to another company last year.
Meanwhile Tatneft experienced problems with uninterrupted supply of its newly redesigned finished products under the Lux-PAO lubricant brand.
After eight years of idling, Tatneft-Nizhnekamskneftekhim-Oil restarted its PAO production last year in January, but soon it filed for bankruptcy for its outstanding debts and a month later at an auction was sold to another company, Capital-Invest, for 2.5 billion rubles (then U.S. $44 million).
Nizhnekamskneftekhim-Oil produced synthetic and semi-synthetic motor oils and synthetic such as compressor oils for Tatneft. The oil major said it now hopes to use its new lubricants blending facility to expand its product line, while using Taneco’s Group III base oils produced at the refinery’s 180,000 t/y Group III base oil plant.