Belarusian business Mineral Wax Plant will upgrade its wax production and triple its finished lubricant capacity in 2016, the company told Lube Report recently.
Based in Pukhovichi, Minsk region, Mineral Wax Plant is the only such enterprise in the country.
We are in a phase of installation of new equipment for production of lubricants, a plant spokesperson told Lube Report. Scheduled to be open in early 2016, the upgraded blending unit will be capable of producing up to 31,000 tons of lubricants annually, or three times more than its current capacity.
The company is also getting ready to modernize its wax production with installation of a new wax hydrotreating unit that could allow improved product quality. The plants annual wax production capacity is 18,000 tons, and the upgrade is expected to add a couple of thousand more tons per year.
At the moment we produce technical or unpurified waxes that contain toxic materials such as sulfur and asphalts. After the upgrade, the final product will be purified, high quality wax that has a higher price on the market, said Valeri Konstantinau, the plants head engineer.
The company produces a wide range of mineral waxes, such as slack waxes, residue wax (foots oil), candle waxes and wax surface modifiers. In addition, it produces conservation and wire oils, greases, emulsifiers and metalworking fluids, as well as special oils such as refrigerating and annealing, and oils for hydro mechanical and hydrostatic transmissions.
The company is export-oriented and ships around 80 percent of its production abroad. Ukraine is its largest export market. Other destinations for its products are Russia, Moldavia and a number of European countries, such as Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Germany and Lithuania.