Salzbergen refinery
The Salzbergen refinery was founded in 1860. It still produces today at the same location - in Salzbergen , in the southern Emsland - and is therefore the world's oldest specialty refinery still in production. The company is known today under the name H&R ChemPharm and belongs to the SDAX listed H&R AG .
history
Beginnings (1860-1931)
In 1860 interested parties from the southern Emsland Salzbergen and the Münsterland met to negotiate with landowners in Salzbergen and Hummeldorf about the extraction of the oil shale in the ground . So they left Leopold Gompertz from Mannheim their Berechtsame . He founded a factory in Salzbergen for the extraction of mineral oil and paraffin . He called this company the paraffin and photogen factory .
The slate obtained in the area was dried and then carbonized in retorts . Water and oil vapors distilled off at 300 ° C. The distillate was a yellowish-brown, strongly smelling oil. It came without further purification as " rock oil " on the market and was used for lighting purposes. Technical difficulties and the profitability of the company (only 15 l of oil from one ton of rock) forced the new plant manager Wilhelm Lepenau (since 1861) to switch to petroleum in 1862.
He obtained Pennsylvanian crude oil in blue barrels, the wooden barrels of 159 l. From then on, gasoline, luminous and lubricating oil and paraffin were produced in Salzbergen. After a short time, the small distillation company had developed into a petroleum refinery . Even after the death of Dr. Lepenau on October 31, 1901, the refinery's capacities and product range were steadily expanded, so that night shifts had to be worked for the first time during the First World War in order to meet the war's “hunger for raw materials”. Due to inflation and the global economic crisis of the 1920s, the Salzbergen refinery ran into financial difficulties.
Wintershall Refinery Salzbergen (1931–1994)
With the takeover of the plant by Wintershall in 1931 and the construction of numerous new production facilities, the throughput was now around 40,000 t per year. But the upswing did not last long. In 1945, the refinery was completely destroyed by 4,000 aircraft bombs .
The reconstruction approved by the British military government in 1946 up to a capacity of 60,000 t of raw material per year was a special milestone in history. As a result of the sister refinery located in Lingen , the field of activity was increasingly shifted to the production of lubricants (engine oils, gear oils, industrial oils) from 1952.
Despite numerous innovations and expansions, the refinery found itself in economic difficulties, not least due to the oil crisis of the 1970s. In order to get out of the red, Wintershall AG invested around 300 million DM in state-of-the-art system technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s and expanded the refinery's capacity to 400,000 t / year.
Lubricant Refinery Salzbergen GmbH (1994–2000)
But even the new investments could not improve the economic situation significantly, so that Wintershall AG decided to close the location. However, two of the refinery's major customers - Hansen & Rosenthal KG from Hamburg and the Münsterland Wilhelm Scholten GmbH - agreed on March 24, 1994 to buy the refinery for a symbolic price of DM 1 and thus a large part of the 450 jobs at the time to obtain. From now on the refinery was called lubricant refinery Salzbergen GmbH ( SRS GmbH ).
The refinery's mixing and bottling facility has also become a service provider for other companies in the industry since the sale. In 1996, the company signed a service agreement with ARAL Lubricants GmbH & Co. KG for the mixing and filling of a large part of their automotive and industrial lubricants. For this purpose, the mixing and filling plant was converted into its own company, SRS LubeBlending GmbH .
H&R ChemPharm GmbH (since 2001)
The SRS GmbH was the 2000 WASAG taken, from which the H & R WASAG AG was created, which includes several German explosive works (including WANO gunpowder GmbH) and a plastic factory in southern Germany included. During this time, the Salzbergen location was divided into several group companies:
- H&R ChemPharm GmbH (Holding and Administration)
- H&R Chemical-Pharmaceutical Specialties GmbH (refinery and laboratory)
- H&R LubeBlending GmbH (mixing and filling company)
- SRS lubricant refinery Salzbergen GmbH (dispatch)
In May 2011, the general meeting of shareholders decided to change the name to H&R AG.
Today, 400,000 t of raw materials are refined annually in Salzbergen , which are processed into over 600 products. In 2004, in addition to the refinery, a waste incineration plant built as a joint venture with RWE - SRS EcoTherm GmbH - was completed. This enables the steam to operate the refinery to be obtained by incinerating household waste instead of heating oil power plants.
Products
The main activity is the production of chemical-pharmaceutical specialties. This means that you buy the residues from the large refineries that extracted the light constituents - gasoline, diesel and kerosene - from the crude oil and produce various crude oil-based specialties from these heavy constituents, which are further processed in many everyday products. These include the following main groups, among others
- Extracts (as plasticizers for the tire industry)
- Printing ink oils (mainly for newspapers)
- technical white oils ( e.g. for furniture polish)
- medical white oils (e.g. as production oils for food-compatible plastics)
- Paraffins (cosmetics industry, candle wax)
- Base oils (which are refined to various lubricants, such as engine oil)
- Bitumen (e.g. road construction)
literature
- Karin Geerdes: The oil works in Salzbergen - 150 years of living industrial history , in: Yearbook of the Emsländischen Heimatbund Vol. 56/2010, Sögel 2009, pp. 99–114.
- Karin Geerdes: The oil works in Salzbergen - 150 years of living industrial history , H&R ChemPharm GmbH, 255 p., Salzbergen 2010.
Web links
- http://www.hur-chempharm.de
- http://www.hur-wasag.de
- http://www.srs-oil.com/
- http://www.hansen-rosenthal.de/
Coordinates: 52 ° 19 ′ 1.2 ″ N , 7 ° 20 ′ 52.1 ″ E