Gulf Oil opens new Argentina plant
19 April 2013 – The Gulf Oil International Group is celebrating the official opening of its new state-of-the-art blending plant in Argentina – the second new Gulf blending facility to open inside a month coming, as it does, hard on the heals of Gulf’s new facility in Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE.
Some 38 km from the country’s capital, Buenos Aires, the new plant is located on the Acceso Oeste highway that links the main routes of the MERCOSUR customs union countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela), which logistically offers Gulf products an important competitive edge in the region.
Thinking not only of current requirements but also future needs, the new plant has been built on a 20,000 m2 area – with 6,000 m2 of that being covered space – in the town of La Reja, a province of Buenos Aires. It is located in an exclusively industrial zone, which ensures it can function without interfering with urban life in the area.
Gulf’s old plant, which was situated on the outskirts of Buenos Aries, presented the company with limited space for development and offered certain logistical difficulties. This, coupled with an increasing demand for Gulf products, made the decision to build a new plant inevitable, as Emilio Alvarez Cañedo, CEO of Gulf Oil Argentina explains.
“The new plant is the result of nearly a decade of strong business growth. Delivery in a timely manner has always been one of the great attributes of the company. So it was decided to build a new plant.”
It has an initial production target of 6,000 tons a year. For the next three years production is estimated at 9.600 tons p/a with it ultimately planned to reach 15,000 tons p/a in five years, from a single shift.
With this volume, Gulf Oil Argentina would be providing for 5% of the national market.
Capacity increase apart, the major improvement over Gulf’s old plant is that the production process is now fully automated. The design concept of the plant was to deliver an automated assembly line, where raw material enters at one side and finished product for distribution leaves at the other.
“The plant is automated to the point that we did not have much need to expand our operating staff. We only added positions in maintenance and quality areas,” continues Emilio Alvarez Cañedo, who also explains how the new Gulf plant is unique amongst other such facilities nationally. “Nowadays in Argentina there are lubricants production plants that are much larger than ours, of course, but none is designed with this assembly line concept. They are all plants where parts were added, not integrated – like ours. And, we are able to deliver products in all kinds of packaging: from bulk trucks to 100 cubic cm packaging, through thousand litre containers, 205 litre drums, 20 litre buckets, 4 litre, one litre and 450 cubic cm bottles.”
The plant also boasts a bespoke line for packing spray oil drums, which is extremely important, as one of Gulf Oil Argentina’s most successful product lines is the Argenfrut range of natural, environmentally friendly pesticides.
Base Oil storage capacity for the new plant is 1,100 m3, which comprises 33 tanks of 33 m3 each. The tanks are located in the plant’s outer area, which is dedicated to handling bulk commodities. Each type of raw material has its own exclusive filling line in the blending zone, thus preventing any contamination between raw materials. The facility can also stock 1,150 pallets of finished products – the equivalent of 1,000 m3 of product – and has a truck scale for precise control of raw material movement and bulk finished products.
The opening of the new plant will also herald a growth in the range of products on offer from Gulf in Argentina. “Over the next two years we have prepared a schedule of new products and packaging launches to reach market segments that we couldn’t supply, until now,” explains Emilio Alvarez Cañedo. “The first two releases of this schedule are already in the market: the semi-synthetic 10W-40 Gulf Tec and the Gulf Pride 4T for motorbikes and of course with synthetic and other top tiers to follow.”
Set against both a local and a global backdrop where the lubricant companies that have been traditionally labelled as “Majors” are leaving the downstream lubricant business to concentrate on oil extraction, Gulf Oil, by contrast, has made a strategic decision to expand its downstream operations to take advantage of this existing and growing market opportunity. The recent purchase of leading global metal working fluids manufacturer Houghton International took Gulf into the world’s top ten lubricant brands and the opening of this new plant is a further indication of Gulf’s commitment to accelerated growth in the downstream lubricant sector.
For more information contact Sam Cork: [email protected]
