Gulf Oil launches new blending plant near Buenos Aires

The Gulf Oil International Group officially opened a new state-of-the-art lubricants blending plant in Argentina, closely following the launch 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).
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, Emilio Alvarez Cañedo, CEO of Gulf Oil Argentina, said.
“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 per annum (tpa), ultimately reaching 15,000 tpa in five years, from a single shift.
With this volume, Gulf Oil Argentina could supply 5% of Argentina’s lubricants demand.
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.
Cañedo said the assembly line concept makes the plant unique in Argentina.
“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.
Gulf Oil plans to expand its product offering, with the opening of the new plant. “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,” Cañedo said. “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.”