China began to produce petroleum lubricants commercially in 1940's. Due to the very low capacity in China at that time, most of the needed lubricants must be imported. After the establishment of People's Republic of China, the lubricating oil industry was developed very quickly. With great efforts for more than 50 years, the lube oil quality has been made great improvements.
China's lubricating oil market has been opened since 1992. At that time the supply of lubricating oil falls short of demand so that the profit was much high. Petroleum companies built new facilities or expanded their existing capacity. Local and foreign blending plants were put into production sooner or later. Now the base oil capacity and blending capacity in China is more than 4.4 million tons and 10 million tons separately.
China's lubricating oil can meet the requirements of machinery industry with not very high automation level. However, there are great caps of lubricating oil between China and advanced countries.
With strict environmental protection laws and regulations and with technical improvements in automobile and other industries, the lubricating oil will be developed towards upgrading, multi grade and general applications.
This paper falls into 2 sections, one covering the current situation and trends of PetroChina's Lubricating oil industry, and the other one discussing market forecast and technical requirement for its development. 1. Current 1.1 Review situation and trends of It was middle 1940's when China began to produce petroleum lubricants commercially. According PetroChina's to statistics the grease production in China was no more than 40 tons in 1949 and most of lubricating oil industry lubricating oil needed must be imported. After the establishment of People's Republic of China, the lubricating oil industry was developed very quickly and the production reached 348,000 tons in 1965. There wasn't any national base oil standard available in China until 1983 when China has been carried out reform and open policy and has made great efforts in order to coincide with international standard. In 1995 the quality of gasoline engine oil, diesel engine oil, railroad engine oil and two-stroke engine oil reached the international level of the end 1980's. The quality of gear oil for automobile and industries, anti-wear hydraulic fluid, marine oil reached or approached the highest international level of the beginning 1990's. Now the China's lubricating oil capacity occupies third place after USA and Russia. The capacity of lubricating oils all over the world is shown in Table 1.
BLOCK 2 - - FORUM 8 113
Country Capacity USA 925 RUSSIA 439 CHINA 2