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January 15, 2013

Oxea to increase production capacities in Texas, with optimized processes

Gerald Ondrey

The chemical company Oxea GmbH (Oberhausen, Germany; www.oxea-chemicals.com) has developed several innovative continuous processes to expand its production at its site in Bishop, Texas, USA. The optimizations will add significant further volume, beyond the already announced capacity increases for potassium formate and trimethylolpropane (TMP). Potassium formate is used, among other applications, as a component in well-servicing fluids for the extraction of oil and gas and for de-icing. TMP is a widely used building block for polymers, especially in polyesters and polyurethanes, but is also used in a plethora of other areas, such as, for example, synthetic lubricants.

“Our production site in Bishop is of great importance to our polyols, which constitute a significant part of Oxea’s Derivatives portfolio. These products have a very diversified range of uses in manufacturing industries and we market the portfolio worldwide,” said Miguel Mantas, member of Oxea’s Executive Board and responsible for Marketing and Sales. “Over the course of the last years, we were able to continuously use excellent initiatives such as this one — not only to expand capacity and increase the onstream reliability of the units, but also to develop higher quality product types, which have allowed us to better serve our customers’ needs and to support them in their growth.”

“Over the past years we successfully implemented a series of projects to enhance the efficiency of our production units and to optimize energy usage. It is quite remarkable that all of our projects required only minor investments. They were implemented quickly and contributed greatly towards the improvement of the Bishop site,” comments Martina Flöel, spokesperson for the Oxea Executive Board, who is also responsible for Production and Technology. “We owe this development to the profound experience, creativity and appetite for innovation of the Oxea staff,” Flöel says.