Jotun Tank Coatings: Tankguard Range & Storage Linings 2026

Jotun tank coatings have been applied to storage tanks, refinery vessels, and chemical cargo tanks for nearly 70 years, with the Oslo-headquartered company’s Tankguard range now covering everything from potable water linings to sour crude service at 160°C. Founded in 1926 and operating across more than 100 countries, Jotun is one of the few coatings suppliers to offer independently tested and globally certified products across onshore storage, refinery, petrochemical, and marine cargo tank applications from a single product family.

Jotun Tank Coatings: The Tankguard Range Explained

The Tankguard product family is Jotun’s primary offering for tank lining applications. Every product in the range is designed for airless spray application using single-leg equipment, reducing contractor complexity and enabling application across a wide temperature window. Products are independently tested and certified against global specifications for crude oil, chemicals, petrochemicals, solvents, and potable water service.

The range is structured around two performance tiers. General-purpose linings — Tankguard AR, Tankguard 412, Tankguard Storage — cover the majority of onshore storage applications including crude oil tanks, petroleum product tanks, and water storage. Specialist products — Tankguard Plus, Tankguard SF, Chemflake Special, and the NCV series — target high-temperature sour crude service, aggressive chemical environments, and jet fuel applications where standard epoxy chemistry is insufficient.

Jotun tank coatings are formulated around three core chemistries. Phenolic and novolac epoxies provide the broadest chemical resistance — covering pH 3 to pH 14 — and the highest temperature thresholds, making them the standard choice for petroleum, biofuel, and alkaline chemical service. Vinyl ester systems such as Chemflake Special target extreme acid exposure (pH 0 to pH 9) with fast cure times. Zinc silicate formulations handle the specialist demands of solvent and alcohol service, resisting almost all chemicals between pH 5.5 and pH 10.

Key Products: Storage Tank Linings

Tankguard SF is Jotun’s flagship fast-return-to-service lining for storage tanks. Solvent-free and applied wet-on-wet, it cuts shutdown time significantly versus conventional multi-coat systems. Rated for sour crude service up to 140°C, it is the preferred specification for heated crude storage in refinery and terminal environments where minimising out-of-service time is the primary commercial constraint.

Tankguard Plus extends sour crude resistance to 160°C and cures for service in five days, making it the preferred choice for high-temperature crude and petroleum product tanks where extended downtime is commercially unacceptable. Both products address one of the core operational challenges for tank terminal operators: minimising the revenue gap while tanks are offline for inspection or recoating under API 653 maintenance programmes.

Tankguard Storage is the standard two-component polyamine-cured phenolic/novolac epoxy lining for petroleum and crude oil tanks. It provides excellent resistance to high-temperature products including crude oil up to 120°C, with 48-hour return to service achievable for petroleum tanks — one of the fastest turnarounds in the standard epoxy segment. Tankguard AR provides general-purpose chemical resistance for oil, gas, and tank farm applications across a broad cargo list.

Tankguard 412 is a solvent-free two-component epoxy lining with a specific focus on safety in confined space application — formulated to minimise solvent exposure for applicators working inside tank shells. It is approved for potable drinking water, grey water, and crude oil service, and is certified for use across both onshore and offshore storage systems. The solvent-free formulation makes it a practical choice for operators who need a single product qualified for both utility water tanks and hydrocarbon service within the same terminal fleet, reducing the number of approved products to manage.

Specialist Linings: Chemical Resistance and Conductive Coatings

Chemflake Special is Jotun’s highest-specification chemical resistance product — a glass-flake reinforced vinyl ester coating rated for extreme acid and chemical exposure. Targeted at chemical storage tanks in petrochemical and industrial facilities where cargo compatibility across frequently changing products is essential, the glass-flake matrix provides both barrier performance and exceptional service life. It is the direct competitor to glass-flake epoxy and vinyl ester systems from Hempel and Advanced Polymer Coatings in the specialist chemical lining segment.

Chemtech GM is a solvent-free option for storage tanks requiring lining in combination with glass fibre mats, suited to applications where enhanced mechanical strength is required alongside chemical resistance.

For tanks requiring static conductivity control, Jotun offers two dedicated products. Tankguard CV Pro is a conductive lining for onshore and buried tanks. Tankguard NCV and Tankguard NCV N are phenolic/novolac epoxy coatings with conductivity built in — NCV is independently tested by SINOPEC RIPP and specifically designed for jet fuel tank internal lining service, while NCV N targets refinery and oil and gas applications requiring superior chemical resistance alongside conductivity.

Tankguard DW is a solvent-free primer and finish coat for drinking water tanks and pipes, while Tankguard Zinc is an inorganic zinc-silicate coating offering exceptional solvent resistance — including methanol — applied at up to 170 µm dry film thickness without mud cracking. Two Petrobras-specification products, Tankguard Type II and Tankguard Type III, complete the storage lining family. Both are solvent-free epoxy systems reinforced with ceramic fillers meeting N-2912 Type II and III standards respectively — Type III additionally incorporating glass flakes for enhanced barrier performance.

Jotun Tank Coatings: Product Comparison by Service

The table below summarises the principal Jotun tank coatings products across storage service conditions. Temperature limits and return-to-service times are indicative — always confirm against the current Jotun technical datasheet and Jotun’s Tank Lining Resistance List for the specific stored product.

Cargo Tank Coatings and IMO Compliance

The majority of chemical and product tanker cargo tanks are carbon steel, requiring protection from both corrosion and the cargoes themselves. Jotun tank coatings for the marine cargo segment are designed to meet the operational flexibility demands of modern tanker trading patterns, where a single vessel may carry petroleum products, chemicals, and vegetable oils across consecutive voyages.

Cargo coating compliance in the marine segment is governed by IMO Resolution MSC.215(82) — the Performance Standard for Protective Coatings (PSPC) — which sets minimum requirements for the coating of dedicated seawater ballast tanks and void spaces on new ships. For chemical tankers, cargo tank coating qualification is a condition of class approval and charterer acceptance, with coatings assessed against the IBC Code cargo compatibility lists. The IMO PSPC standard is the baseline reference for marine coating specification on vessels entering service from 2008 onwards.

Jotun’s cargo tank product range is independently tested and listed against chemical cargo compatibility requirements. For terminal operators managing chemical tanker berths, the qualification overlap between Jotun’s marine cargo and onshore storage ranges is a practical advantage when consolidating approved product lists across the supply chain — a single supplier approval framework covering both ship and shore reduces contractor and inspection complexity on large terminal rehabilitation programmes.

Surface Preparation and Application Requirements

All Jotun tank coatings require carbon steel substrates to be grit-blasted to Sa 2.5 (ISO 8501-1) — near-white metal — before application. Concrete substrates require specialist abrasive sweep profiling; stainless steel and galvanised steel require specific surface preparation methods confirmed in the relevant product datasheet. Deviations from the specified surface preparation grade are the leading cause of premature lining failure, and contractor compliance with Sa 2.5 is a mandatory hold point in any compliant application quality plan.

Environmental conditions during application — substrate temperature, ambient temperature, relative humidity, and dew point — must all fall within Jotun’s specified application windows. The wet-on-wet application capability of Tankguard SF is a significant practical advantage on large-diameter tanks where multiple applicators work simultaneously: it eliminates inter-coat waiting time and compresses total application duration, directly reducing the tank’s out-of-service window. For operators managing industrial tank coating programmes across multiple assets, application scheduling is as important a cost variable as product selection.

Jotun Tank Coatings in the Global Market

Jotun competes in the tank coatings market alongside Hempel, whose Hempaline range targets similar storage tank applications, and Advanced Polymer Coatings, whose MarineLINE product addresses the cargo tank segment from a specialist position. The top tank coating companies in 2026 collectively serve a market driven by API 653 inspection cycles, increasingly aggressive stored product specifications, and operator pressure to minimise tank downtime during recoating programmes.

Jotun’s scale — group revenue of NOK 33.4 billion in 2023 across paints, coatings, and powder coatings — gives it technical development and global supply chain advantages that smaller specialist suppliers cannot easily replicate. Its presence in more than 100 countries means Tankguard products and technical support are accessible to terminal operators across every major storage hub, from Rotterdam and Fujairah to Singapore and Houston.

For terminal operators and refinery engineers evaluating lining programmes across a global tank terminal network, the Tankguard range’s combination of broad product coverage, fast return-to-service performance, and independent certification makes it one of the most complete single-supplier solutions available in 2026.

Jotun Company Snapshot