RECYCLED OIL?: With new technologies, used motor oil can be cleaned up and re-refined, making it as good as new.
Image: Courtesy of Universal Lubricants
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
Changing the oil in a car every 5,000 kilometers or so seems to be the industry standard (and may well be overkill). But that means a whole lot of pouring and draining motor oil into and out of the U.S. auto fleet: 1.3 billion gallons or so, to be precise.
So what happens to all that used oil—and could it be recycled? After all, reusing that lubricant would not only avoid pumping it out of the ground in the first place, thereby delivering a little energy independence from foreign suppliers, it also might help cut climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.
ScientificAmerican.com spoke with engineers Joseph Franceschi and James Condela of Universal Lubricants, which just completed a 45.4 million liter refinery in Wichita, Kans., to convert used oil into usable motor oil.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Can motor oil be recycled—and how?
Franceschi: Yes, oil can be recycled.
In general, you take crude oil and refine it to make a lubricant. This is called base lube stock. Then you have to take that base lube stock and blend it with additives in order to put it into a passenger car. That's what gives it color actually. You're adding an anti-foaming additive, a dispersant and a detergent.
When you put the oil into the engine, it is essentially degraded by heating it, and is also oxidized. As all these additives start to break down, the engine starts to wear more. That puts some heavy metals into the oil. The anti-foaming additive breaks down and you start to get water mixing with the oil and making sludge. The same breakdown happens with the dispersant and the detergent. That's the reason they recommend to change it every X number of miles because of the thermal degradation and oxidation. Oil only has a certain life span.
We clean that used oil by using pretty conventional refinery technologies. One of them is vacuum distillation, which dewaters the oil. Used motor oil comes with somewhere between 5 and 7 percent water in it. The first thing you have to do is get the water out of it.
Then we do wiped-film evaporation. This essentially separates out all the contaminants and additives that are put into passenger car motor oils. Then after that, we go through a hydrotreating process that gets up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and 1,100 [pounds per square inch]. That infuses hydrogen back into the hydrocarbon molecules and makes it a very high quality re-refined oil.
If you're thinking of it in a very simple way, we're filtering the used oil with very sophisticated technologies and processes.
How much oil is recycled presently?
Franceschi: Most of it is recycled, though small amounts are improperly recycled. The old joke is that if you drive past a quick lube place on Monday mornings, you can see garbage bags full of used oil containers. Things collect back there because people don't want to dump it down a hole or into a sewer.
You're really dealing with a pretty dirty product. It has to be collected properly. We collect 30 million gallons of used oil. … It's one of these industries people don't really know about.
Condela: There's about 1.3 billion gallons of used oil generated in the U.S. each year. Ten percent goes into a re-refining process like ours. The majority of that used oil is collected and sold as a combustible fuel, mainly used in power plants or industrial boilers.
What is re-refined oil used for then?
Franceschi: It's used essentially as a refined crude lubricant. Re-refined oil used to have a bad color associated with it because in the old days they didn't have modern technologies. They did some filtering and poured it over clay. They had these very, sort of, antique technologies. It did not make a high quality oil and it got a very bad reputation.
See what we're tweeting about
34 Comments
Add CommentI read somewhere once that somebody drove a Stanley Steamer across the United States burning only used crankcase oil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBuy synthetic oil and change it out once every 15,000 miles or so. This is a great way to reduce consumption. I've been doing it for 25 years and have never had an engine problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQ-1:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf reprocessed used oil that can be eliminated all harmful chemicals such as Dioxin, and other carcinogenic chemicals inside, then reprocessed used oil can be used in burning, or as lubricants for cars!
Used oil contains many harmful chemicals and heavy metals, therefore this used oil is a great risk for living environments and especially for animals and trees!
Q-2: Can we make or obtain higher quality lubricant created from the reprocessed used oil?
changing oil at 15,000miles on synthetic oil that seems to be risky for car engine?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou CAN safely use synthetic motor oil for 15K miles, but only IF you change your OIL FILTER every 5K miles (and add about 1/2 quart of new oil to make up for what was in the used filter). Mobile One and high-end Castrol sythetics are excellent products. They last longer because they do not break down as fast as "pure" oil. However, they still need to be filtered, like all oils, and the filter needs to be changed regularly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany do not realize that the vast majority of oil on the market today does have some synthetic oil blended in, which is why the 3K mile recommendation, which was accurate when most of the oils were "synthetic free," can safely be raised to 5K as long as the engine is in good working order and the oil level is kept at proper levels.
Buy synthetic oil and change it out once every 15,000 miles or so. I've been doing it for 30 years and have never had an engine problem, my latest car has never seen regular oil, after I got the car (new) I changed to synthetic oil immediately, it is 12 years old, has 65000 Miles, it do’s not burn oil, very good in gas mileage, the only thing I change in this car was (oil, oil filter, air filter)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI only change the filter when I change the oil - every 15,000 miles. It has worked on Mazda, Nissan, Saab, GMC and Volvo autos / trucks. The engines still performed at 125,000 miles as well as they did at 1000 miles (same fuel economy, same sound, no oil consumption). I never had any engine maintenance performed except spark plugs and cleaning fuel injectors, which is probably not needed anyway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI used Castrol (non-synthetic) 20W/50 in my 1986 Honda Prelude for 435,000 miles with no signs of oil burning or use, by changing it & the filter every 3000-4000 miles (depending on highway or local use during that period). Compression was to factory specs until 385,000 miles. Still gets same great gas mileage. Did all tune-ups and recommended maintenance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHonda recommends 10W oil during summer and 5W during winter. My gas mileage did drop by about 5% when I switched to 20W/50 at about 25,000 miles, but I feel that is a small price ($$) to pay to get the extra engine life.
I wonder now what the trade-off in extra vehicle life is in terms of oil or energy usage, in terms of the energy needed to replace (manufacture new and dispose of old) an entire auto at 200,000 miles vs. a 5% drop in fuel efficiency to get 435,000 miles of vehicle life?
I have always wondered why auto makers didn't put centrifuges on their engines. The oil could have ten times the life it currently has. When I was in the Navy, my ship used oils to lubricate the steam turbines. All of the oil was sent through a centrifuge which would separate out the contaminants and water and make dark dirty oil look light and clean again.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess the additives would eventually become depleted, but the oil life would be much greater and engine protection would be much greater with metals and sludges being removed every time the engine was running. Plus the Navy ship centrifuges weren't all that technical, I would think a small centrifuge could easily be made to clean the engine oil on cars, much better than a filter!
Check out Puradyn Oil Filtration (http://www.puradyn.com) . They are a small company with a technology seems pretty unique. They make a bypass oil filtration system that has proven very effective. The army has started testing there system on some vehicles and so far so good. They have some trucking companies claiming to be running there trucks over 600,000 miles on a single oil change. I met the CEO (fellow Purdue engineer) when I was in college and he was pretty excited about the technology.There technology hasn't really caught on yet but now that everyone wants go go green maybe we will start seeing it. Looks like it has proven to be very successful for several trucking companies (reduces costs and even improves fuel milage).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the used lube oil is used to fuel a boiler that otherwise would be burning ordinary fuel oil, then that has displaced virgin crude to the same degree as re-refining the oil for use as a lubricant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo for this process to be net gain it would have to require less cost/energy to re-refine to make new lube from crude. The multiple steps described in the article are not encouraging in that regard.
Having been around automobiles all my life (Dad was engineer w/ Dodge Bros and then Chrysler), I've never held re-refined oil in particularly high regard. It could be that my impressions have been wrong or that technology has significantly changed. Nevertheless, a number of years back Consumer Reports ran an extensive test on motor oils and oil filters and came to some surprising results which, to me, reflect what's really going on in this arena, instead of all the opinions and anecdotal information. I would like to see this kind of testing of oils and filters done again, this time also including synthetic oils and re-refined oils. I'm going to put a bug in Consumer Reports ear .. how about you?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the name of public health, e.g the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, perhaps t'is time to also mention our rather unwholesome habit of blissfully ingesting routinely recycled cooking oils from fish & chip shops - from where truckful loads of rather "fishy" oil slicks cart away the greasy evidence of our own inter-cellular body pollution! Surely, our trillions of cell membranes deserve better than that!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat about rocks?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan rocks be recycled?
What about rocks?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre rocks biodegradable?
This depends on where you live and how many miles you put on your car a year.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you are telling old people living in Buffalo and driving their car 4,000 miles a year to change their oil every 15000 miles, you should be arrested for criminal negligence.
If you live in Arizona and drive all over the place, no problems.
I read somewhere that highly purified water will do the same job as Oil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut all those kinds of innovations would impact on the bottom line of the Oil producers - so they tend not to get support.
The Stanley Steamer motor car was so powerful that it could travel at 100 miles an hour.
If you needed to make a fast getaway - it could reverse at the same speed .
Common sense suggests that we should simply have improved the steam engine.
Actually it probably only needed a new pressurized gas bottle to ignite a miniture boiler and soon the steam would have been sending the car off at high speed.
In all the debates about Nuclear, Coal,and Gas to be used in the power stations - most people do not know
that these fuels only boil water to make steam.
It is the steam which turns the big turbines.
We really only need to find a better way of turning water into steam. Put a container of water into a micro-wave oven and soon you have steam.
A micro-wave process to boil water to produce steam for the big turbines, is the future , I think.
Then again - what would I know ?
Yes, I think Oil Can be Recycled.I know of Research work carried out in Nigerian University with regards to the latter.The prototype drawing actually resides in my home back in Nigeria, and this dates back close to twenty years or more.I will be willing to partner with potential investors...my contacts
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisemail:hikacus@yahoo.com
I never need to look at my oil level : it never varies between oil changes and stays transparent. That is because I never drive at high revs, so the oil stays properly cooled. As the article says, it is excess heat that breaks down oil molecules. So I get good mileage, extended motor life , cheap petrol bills and minimal pollution. (But in all truth I still keep an eye on the dip-stick just in case...)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recall as an Ag student (1970) our shop teacher using a hemp rope to clean used oil by osmosis. It took along time but worked great.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisis this re-refined oil used in all countries?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs this actually new? if yes has efforts been made to pass on the information to industries?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am told that th reason they don't do this is because the centrifuge would have to run at high speeds, requiring fine balance and more electricity than the cars currently produce. So, the centrifuge itself would cost several hundred dollars (a filter only costs a couple of bucks) and you'd have to have a better alternator (more copper wiring, most cost).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do I submit my question to this site. I can't find anywhere on the site to do so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do I submit my question? I can't find anywhere on the site to do that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObviously if they did the oil companys would object due to a reduction of their busines. This oil subject is a dirty one and your proposal about centrifuging the oil in order to separate the impurities is wonderful. But I suppose it is patented and the holders of the rights to it are supressing its use. Does anyone know when or if such a patent will expire?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmm.. interesting subject! I like the idea, and I wonder if perhaps an engine lubricant can be developed or has been developed using vegetable oil instead of a petroleum base? I think about the contaminants - heavy metals, etc. in the oil - wear in the engine bearings on start-up, and in the upper cylinder area, getting in the oil. Perhaps some of the problems could be reduced if engines all came with standard pre-lubricating systems (lubrication before engine start-up)? Anyhow, great to see that the oil is being re-refined!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi am interested in purchase of used engine oil in abundant qty, intersted parites may contact me on moazzam1ali@hotmail.com or can call me on 0092-331-4523575 or 0092-334-4224240
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRgds
Moazzam Bukhari
you need to shut up because nobody wants to here what you have to say!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistrue dat!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistrue dat!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi know right!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisis that all u have to say is yes???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this