Home Appointments & Contracts New name at Hull chemicals park

New name at Hull chemicals park

Veolia’s Simon Elshaw (centre) is welcomed to Saltend Chemicals Park by px Business Development Manager, Garry Gibbon (left) and Services Manager, Steve Farniss.

Just weeks after officially taking ownership of Saltend Chemicals Park in Hull, the px group has welcomed the first new business to the site.

Veolia (Hull) Industrial Services has taken around 2,000 sq. ft. of office space and a compound area for the storage of vehicles, together with specialist cleaning and protective equipment.

When Teesside based infrastructure solutions business, px, acquired the site on March 15th, it announced that one of the key aims was to develop the park – including attracting new partners to site.

Welcoming Veolia to Saltend, Site Director, Jay Brooks, said: “We are delighted to have been able to attract such a well known and reputable company to join us. Around 30 per cent of the 370 acre site is unused at present, providing huge potential for growth. We hope this will be the first of many businesses to come here as we work to update and improve the facilities available.”


Simon Elshaw, General Manager with Veolia Industrial Services, added: “We have been providing services on the site for about 25 years so this move makes great sense for us. It will save time, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

“However, we operate in a much wider area of Yorkshire and so this excellent, new, adaptable base, with space to grow, provides a solid platform on which to develop our business. I am very excited about running our operations from such a centre of industrial excellence.”

With about 30 people employed at the new base, Veolia’s services include high pressure water jetting, tankers and vacuum systems cleaning, abrasive blasting and industrial coatings and the provision of safety standby teams.

The px group is providing comprehensive energy, infrastructure, operations and maintenance services at Saltend, which was established in 1914 and has, for the last 50 years, been owned by BP.

It currently comprises a collaborative cluster of businesses that manufacture more than a million tonnes of chemical products a year. These are used in everyday items including clothing, paints, pharmaceuticals and packaging.

Leading global companies operating at the upper tier COMAH* site are Air Products, BP, Engie, INEOS, Nippon Gohsei, Perenco, Vivergo and Yara.

Established as an independent company in 2002 and with an operating history going back to 1992, px has proven expertise in managing, operating and maintaining some of Europe’s largest industrial facilities.

In March of 2016, the business announced a partnership with Blue Water Energy, a specialist private equity energy fund, to support a strategic growth plan. The Saltend purchase is the first expansion through acquisition.

The px group also currently operates major gas processing plants in Scotland and on Teesside; gas pipeline operations in the North Sea; power generating operations on Teesside, in Cumbria, Lincolnshire and in Wales and fuel storage and distribution facilities in Wales.

Through its engineering and consultancy company, px ECL, it is supplying owner’s engineering (OE) and project management services on the £650 million construction of the world’s largest, new build, biomass combined heat and power (CHP) station at Teesport. Generating up to 299MWe of electricity – enough to supply 600,000 homes – the project is one of the most important thermal power plant construction projects for decades.

An energy trading division – E24 – manages energy buying and selling on behalf of clients, as well as services relating to industry ICT and administrative activities.