House ok's bill, re-refine more used motor oil

[Nyogtha]

For Group 1 lubricating oils, where solvent extraction and solvent dewaxing were the primary technologies used, the use of specialized grades of crude oil richer in the desirable lube oil property molecules meant some crude oils yielded a great deal of lubricating oil, and lityle ekse. A refinery I worked with had a selerate Process Oils Unit processing heavy crude that had no naphtha / gasoline or LPG content to speak of. The lightest product from the atmospheric distillation column was a 30°API gravity kerosene, which was blended into off-highway duesel at that time. All other fractions except the vacuum tower bottoms were used as lubricating oil nkend stocjs or other specialty industrues such as explosive binders, inks& dyes, Rubbermaid products, etc. Now it's primarily used to supply transformer oils with the lack if emphasis on Group 1 lubricant oils here, along with all the other specialty uses. All the while, this section only runs about 3% of the same crude rate the fuels & petrochemicals part of that refinery runs, on different crude (primarily Eagle Ford shale now).

With catalytic dewaxing (hydroisomerization) technology for lube oils, a much wider slate of crude oils are useful for producing lube oils as the process chemically converts molecules with less desireable lubricating properties to molecules with more desireable lubricating properties, synthesyzing them instead of just depending on the presence of desirable naturally occuring molecules.

So it's not really appropriate any more to talk about lube oil base stock yield from any specific crude oil without taking individual refinery configuration into account. What you see represented are some average yield values from refineries in specific geographuc areas. Refer to a prior post I made in this thread and Link 1 there for a prior explanation of a similar graph posted a few years back.

Plus keep in mind the market demand for lubricating oil volumes is dwarfed by the market demand for fuel & petrochemical volumes.

 

[SonofJoe]

Nyogtha,

I've never tried it but I would have thought you could vacuum distil used oil without too many horrible things happening with the additive pack.

The ZDDP would very likely start breaking down to at around 180°C to yield some stinky heavy mercaptans but I'd assume all off-gas from the process would be treated anyway.

VIIs & Ashless Dispersants would very likely be thermally stable upto say 250°C. I'm not sure about Metallic Detergent. You might see some dissociation in which can you would need some kind of acid treatment built in.

BTW, to me, feeding waste oil to a coker, or recovering the base oil as VGO to feed to an FCCU, would be to entirely miss the point of recycling the waste oil in the first place.

 

[Nyogtha]

Originally Posted By: SonofJoe
This 'it takes so much crude oil to make X litres of virgin base oil' argument is a bit bogus and rather unnecessary. It's a bit like saying it needs a one tonne cow to make X amount of fillet steak. It's axiomatic that you don't breed cattle JUST for the best bits! In fact refining crude oil is very like butchery. The trick is to try and 'use everything' in the most efficient way with the least wastage.

It's a bit gushy for my taste but there's a Safety-Kleen video about waste oil recycling here...

https://youtu.be/XhreBkmfosg

The process engineering is somewhat more complicated than I first imagined. I wouldn't have anticipated having to recover ethylene glycol (antifreeze) from used lubricant. I suspect this isn't so much a case of as it accumulating in the oil over a typical OCI but more a case of waste oil and waste antifreeze being dumped in the same waste collection system at the auto-shop. Also I'm surprised that they hydro-treat given that all US base oil is now all heavily hydro-processed when it's first made. This might be a throw back from the days when Group I was still used.


Safety Kleen has certain test criteria & quality standards for used oil accepted for rtheir re-refining process vs. recycling via fuel oil blending. Most likely this has to do with commingled fluids, I've heard brake fluid contamination renders used motor oil unsuitable for re-refining here for example. However recycling for fuel value is still legitimate recycling as it keeps the used lubricant out of landfills and waters.

Hydrotreating is still an effective way to deal with oxidation as one example, the organically bound oxygen is converted to H2O and the oxygen atom is replaced by a hydrogen atom in the hydrocarbon. It also removes color bodies quite well.

Here's more of a plain text process summary from Safety Kleen for their process. However it skips mentioning the thin film evaporation step & technology.

https://www.safety-kleen.com/products-services/oil-solutions/oil-re-refining/re-refining-process

Here's a site with a link to the grades & specs of re-refined base oils marketed by Safety Kleen.

https://www.kleenperformance.com/products/base-oil

Plus they're offering synthetic blend & full synthetic re-refined PCMO now through their Performance Plus brand.

https://www.safety-kleen.com/products-services/products/oils-and-lubricants

Besides go ernment fleets, some rental car agencies are using re-refined PCMO here.

https://www.enterpriseholdings.com/en/pr...ports.html.html

SOJ, since approx. 50% of PCMO is re-refined in Europe, how does that affect retail product labeling on your side of the pond? Surely this volume exceeds government fleet use and a significant portion winds up in retail products. Or is re-refined PCMO exported from Europe instead?

FWIW, I wish there was more emphasis here in the USA on recycling used oil filters as well, but it's growing. How are used PCMO oil filters handled in Europe?

 

[Nyogtha]

Originally Posted By: SonofJoe
Nyogtha,

I've never tried it but I would have thought you could vacuum distil used oil without too many horrible things happening with the additive pack.

The ZDDP would very likely start breaking down to at around 180°C to yield some stinky heavy mercaptans but I'd assume all off-gas from the process would be treated anyway.

VIIs & Ashless Dispersants would very likely be thermally stable upto say 250°C. I'm not sure about Metallic Detergent. You might see some dissociation in which can you would need some kind of acid treatment built in.

BTW, to me, feeding waste oil to a coker, or recovering the base oil as VGO to feed to an FCCU, would be to entirely miss the point of recycling the waste oil in the first place.


Those temperatures are well below the bulk temperature of a typical crude oil vacuum distillation furnace as I recall, and definitely below wall temperatures.

The thin film evaporation is used for a reason, and is right before the hydrotreating step.

I would not feed used PCMO to a FCCU as metals contamination of the catalyst would definitely be a factor there, and I don't know of any refiner that's ever done this. Unforeseen eutectics could play a significant role as well.

However, recycling to a coker still kept the used lubricant out of landfills and waters so I disagree it misses the point if recycling, at least here. Keeping used lubricant out of landfills and waters is the real objective, the ultimate fate whether it be re-refined to recover base stock, burned for BTU value, or fed to a cokerr to produce petroleum coke, fuels, & petrochemicals (if viable) should be IMO market driven. Perhaps you don't have as much of an issue keeping used lubricants out if landfills & waters in Europe?

We've come a long way on drained consumer level PCMO fate here in my lifetime but still have a lot of further opportunity available in usex oil filter recycling here.

 

[SonofJoe]

If 50% of PCMO is recycled in Europe, then it's the first time I've ever heard of it!

At my peak, I calculated that I was responsible for formulating around a billion litres per year of PCMO around the globe. In all the programs I ran, low-tier to high-tier, major oils companies to smaller nationals, I was never once asked to formulate with recycled base oil! Even the diluent oils for things like Ashless & VII were all straight-run stocks.

I can only think that recovered base oils are used in non-automotive applications (of which there are many) or it's flogged off cheap to places like Africa where folks aren't too particular about quality.

 

[Nyogtha]

Sometimes it's funny how organometallic molecules partition during thermal decomposition. Coker foaming & foamover are serious process ussues, a defoaming additive of high molecular weight polysiloxane is injected with the coker feed. A significant portion of this cracks like the hydrocarbon, and the cracked portion results in heavy dilicon contamination of the coker naphtha product preferentially, the remainder winding up in the petroleum coke. Funny how little of it winds up in coker distillate or coker gas oil. This can be a real problem for the naphtha hydrotreater unit and downstream naphtha reformer without the correct aforethought processing scheme. When I was a just out if school engineer, my boss would take calls from our traders on being able to get us excess naphtha cargoes at really discount prices back in the JP4 days. My boss's first question was always "What's wrong with it?" for a good reason as it was unvariably sour (unhydrotreated) naphtha. I worked my way through school in marine custody transfer and well knew how slop oil dealers played catch me if you can with their blending operations.

So when ZDDP thermally cracks, where does the zinc go? Similar for compounds containing sodium, potassium, magnesium, etc. as these would all be permanent poisons to the hydrotreating catalyst, and I expect moly in the sate it's in in used lubricant would be as well, even though hydrotreati g catalyst is typically a sulfided cobalt-moly or nickel-moly active metal matrix on silica-al7mina substrate.

I have a horror story I can tell about trace caustic soda contamination to the naphtha feed to a naphtha hydrotreater and its effects over time from firsthand knowledge from when I was a younger man. My task was to install a naphtha wash on our disulfide seperator to keep the disulfide oil out if the wastewater treating system and recovered slop oil, and primarily reduce re-entry sulfur in the olefin feed to the HF Alkylation unit. Unfortunately this liquid-liquid interface turned out to be a poor application for DP cell technology as specified by the technology provider - so we learned.

 

[Nyogtha]

Originally Posted By: SonofJoe
If 50% of PCMO is recycled in Europe, then it's the first time I've ever heard of it!

At my peak, I calculated that I was responsible for formulating around a billion litres per year of PCMO around the globe. In all the programs I ran, low-tier to high-tier, major oils companies to smaller nationals, I was never once asked to formulate with recycled base oil! Even the diluent oils for things like Ashless & VII were all straight-run stocks.

I can only think that recovered base oils are used in non-automotive applications (of which there are many) or it's flogged off cheap to places like Africa where folks aren't too particular about quality.



50% is the figure in a National Geographic article in 2011, I've seen that figure used elsewhere as well. Probably > 50% by now?

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/110601-green-motor-oil-recycling/

Edit - BTW, that article showed all lubricant production in the USA in 2011 to be less than 1% of all the crude oil refined.

 

[SonofJoe]

Perhaps I should rephrase myself...

As hydrocarbons go, modern base oils are quite miraculous creations! Even standard Group II (the much disparaged Dino 'mineral' grade in the US) is light years better than any Group I base oil I've ever played with. And the thing is, especially in the US, the utility of this awesome stuff is hardly used as oils are tossed far too early. The potential for reusing this marvelous juice, which constitutes 90% of modern PCMO, is self-evident.

To me, recycling used PCMO/HDDO into reusable base oil is THE thing that makes most sense. It preserves the high value inherent in base oil (as opposed to fuel value). However I agree that it's not the only way of recycling oils and simply dumping them is the worst of all options.

 

[Nyogtha]

Originally Posted By: SonofJoe
Perhaps I should rephrase myself...

As hydrocarbons go, modern base oils are quite miraculous creations! Even standard Group II (the much disparaged Dino 'mineral' grade in the US) is light years better than any Group I base oil I've ever played with. And the thing is, especially in the US, the utility of this awesome stuff is hardly used as oils are tossed far too early. The potential for reusing this marvelous juice, which constitutes 90% of modern PCMO, is self-evident.

To me, recycling used PCMO/HDDO into reusable base oil is THE thing that makes most sense. It preserves the high value inherent in base oil (as opposed to fuel value). However I agree that it's not the only way of recycling oils and simply dumping them is the worst of all options.


AFAIK, here in Texas, as a private citizen, there are no regulations barring used motor oil in household waste. For businesses, it's a different matter.

There are regulations regarding "hot draining" oil filters before disposal in landfill, adopted from Federal EPA, but I've never seen any type of enforcement efforts toward private citizens on this. The big campaign here regarding waste management is trying to stop people from putting used disposable baby diapers in particular in recycling bins (No Pongo Panelas)!

I take my used motor oil & oil filters to O'Reilly Auto Parts for recycling as I can see on the ledger you fill out they're part of Safety Kleen's program. Part of that ledger is you're certifying you are only recycling PCMO and haven't commingled it with other fluids. Autozone however accepts used PCMO, transmission fluid, and gear oil (but no filters) and store employees indicate it all goes in one bin, so I figure that's for fuels recycling only. For automatic transmission filter recycling, I take mine to Firestone auto service center as no retail auto parts store here accepts them, not even Walmart TLE who does accept used PCMO & oil filters.

SOJ, if I ever make it to England we'll have to sit down to have a meal & chat!

 

[SonofJoe]

Ah, this kind of talk takes me back to my refining days back in the late 70s!

Okay, from the top...

Never got to play on a coker (just a humble Visbreaker). Yes I can appreciate that bed foaming would be an issue. You're probably injecting exactly the same siloxane antifoam as I might plop into PCMO to prevent foaming. However I could easily imagine how putting used oil into a coker might promote foaming. So many of the things you use in lube oils are there because of their surfactant properties. The difference between anti & pro foaming is smaller than most folks think.

As well as being the Visbreaker process engineer, I took a special interest in hydro-treating. Back in the day, all refineries had a perennial problem with 'leaded slop'. People used to freak that TEL would fractionate into the Medium Naphtha stream and deactivate the Co-Mo/Ni-Mo catalyst of the naphtha hydrotreater and the Pt-Re Reformer catalyst. It wasn't until we had to permanently shut the refinery down that I finally realised that such panic wasn't actually justified. In the dying days of operation, when we were effectively running the entire operation on accumulated tank heels & slop, we realised that the process was actually very tolerant of lead. I seem to recall that all the Pb got zapped in the first inch of the Co-Mo bed. All that worrying for nothing!!

Regarding ZDDP, ZDDP is made by reacting two moles of Dialkyl thioacid with one of Zinc Oxide. Under extreme thermal stress, I'd expect the Zinc to revert to an inorganic form so it would stay in the bottoms fraction.

We used to have a disulphide oil stream from our old Merox plant. By design, it was routed into the diesel rundown. I can't remember how it can up but some bright spark thought this stuff should be routed back to the pipestill to get it into diesel. Sadly they didn't realise it would break down again to mercaptans and just build up & up in the system! Oh happy days...

 

[Nyogtha]

Our disulfide oil was originally routed to heavy fuel oil blending using a common rundown line with the alky polymer but that was deemed undesireable so it was re-routed back to the crude unit through the slop system before I added naphtha wash. With a FCCU we didn't have a problem with disulfide oil buildup in the overall refinery system. The sodium horribly poisoned the naphtha hydrotreater catalyst and we had to scramble finding odd lots of regenerated catalyst readily available for sale to minimize downtime. Wound up with a parfait of layers of different sizes & shapes! Thankfully the sulfur breakthrough to the reformer was intolerable before sodium broke through to the reforming catalyst. We were able to hot hydrogen strip the sulfur off the reforming catalyst and gave it some extra chloride.

The way to handle contaminant metals is with low activity metals trap catalyst if you can't reject them, either in pretreat reactors or in graded beds (like layers of a parfait). Today you'd have a real job trying to find someone to take lead contaminated spent catalyst off your hands. Here all spent hydroprocessing catalyst headed for disposal must now undergo metals reclamation, not inexpensive even when the contaminant metals are pedominantly the vanadium & nickel naturally present in crude oil along with the cobalt, nickel, and moly in the active catalyst. Except for aviation gasoline (100LL) and NASCAR racing fuel, leaded gasoline had been phased out a year or so before I finished my degree.

Visbreaker - the poor man's coker. Coker - an economics engineer's dream and a mechanical engineer's job security. I never directly worked as a coker engineer but worked at a facility with two world class size cokers (no lubes or process oils produced at that facility). None of the facilities I worked at had a visbreaker. I have worked supporting and revamping a supercritical fluid extraction unit, which is between a coker and visbreaker in terms of gas oil yields and metals rejection but doesn't employ cracking. It's a step beyond the propane solvent extraction process for heavy oils.

With all the low sulfur fuel regulations, hydroprocessing has really expanded as well as hydrogen generation. Hydrocracking economics can eclipse FCCU economics these days but having both makes really good synergy as the hydrocracker unconverted oil is so severely hydroprocessed it cracks at Warp 10 in the FCCU and lowers product slate sulfur.

I enjoyed supporting and revamping FCCU's the most, although as far as hydroprocessing I got to design a world class kerosene hydrotreater from grass roots with flexibility to make US spec commercial Jet-A, Euro spec Jet- A1, K-1 heating kerosene, or ultra low sulfur diesel blendstock, plus it co-processed the silicon laden heavy coker naphtha. I also led the first hydrocracker turnaround efforts at the first refinery I worked at with only 5 years out of school, which was a good growth experience. The FCCU world is so dynnamic and with a fluidized instead of fixed catalyst bed, "flushable" to some degree after upstream upsets loaded the catalyst with contaminants. Plus you could change catalyst formulation without a shutdown. The FCCU & FCCU Engineer also got lots of attention both positive (when running well or a new technology trial works out) & negative (when having difficulties) as the biggest economic margin unit.

Well enough - we're definitely not just discussing lube oils now. If you ever come to Texas look me up!

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: Nyogtha


Interestingly, the Yabucoa refinery on Puerto Rico has been converted at least in part for re-refining lube oils from the Caribbean. Sunoco used to produce base oils at that refinery years ago, then it was purchased by Shell around 1991 and run as a more conventional refinery to produce fuels and petrochemical feedstocks, then it was shut down in 2009. They're actually producing their hydrogen electrolytically by cracking water, very energy intensive vs. typical conversion of natural gas and steam to hydrogen and CO2 via steam methane reforming.


http://www.oleinrefinery.com/process-oleinrefinery.html


All great info, thanks. When you mention the site in PR, it came to mind that Ive been there. I was at that site to look at their product. It was focused on product distribution elsewhere in the islands, but we walked around and saw their stuff. I don't recall they had a full operation going at the time. This was before valvoline tried Nexgen and whatnot.

I seem to recall some sort of stripping, settling, and then reblending. I don't recall the electrolysis portion, they may well pay 30-50c/kWh over there, I know my in laws do on another nearby island... but there isn't good ng infrastructure. I do believe they had some level of distillation when I visited, but it didn't strike me as a major process.

The approaches have changed in time too I guess. From valvoline:

The sort of operations mentioned below struck me as more of the process in PR (at the time). It seemed very profitable then, and they were able to sell at a very low price point at the time. They may well have upgraded processes since..

Quote:
Alternative Processes

There are also other alternative processes available on the market in lieu of hydrotreating. These processes include:
Acid Clay Treatment (not offered by CEP)

In the acid clay process, used oil is typically filtered and then heated to remove debris, solid particles and water. It is then mixed with sulfuric acid which extracts metal salts, acids, aromatics, asphaltenes and other impurities. This forms a by-product of acidic sludge that settles out of the oil. The remaining slightly acidic oil is mixed with active fuller’s earth (clay) to remove mercaptans and other contaminants and to improve color. This process requires approximately 0.4 lb of clay per gallon of oil. After clay is filtered from the oil, the final steps are neutralization and distillation of the oil. Acid clay treatment was the predominant technology in the past. According to the US DOE study, there were 150 re-refiners using Acid/Clay in 1960 processing 300 million gallons per year. In 1976, it dropped to 25 active re-refiners processing 51 million gallons per year. Today, in many countries and states, the acid clay process is illegal due to the hazardous waste of the acidic clay from the process.
Vacuum Distillation (offered by CEP)

Vacuum distillation is a simplified “Front End” of the CEP process. It takes advantage of the use of boiling point properties of the used oil to separate various components; water, light hydrocarbons and gas oil, lube distillate and asphalt flux. Vacuum is used to prevent thermal cracking of the hydrocarbons. The main product of vacuum distillation is the lube distillate. While lube distillate technically meets the definition of API Group I base oil, it is not suitable for motor oil. The typical uses for lube distillate are bar and chain lube, process oil, form oil or fuel. Clay treatment can be used to improve the appearance of the lube distillate.
Clay Treatment (offered by CEP)

Clay treatment is often used as a finishing step for lube distillate from vacuum distillation. There are two methods of clay treatment. The first is static beds where lube distillate is fed through the static beds of clay at elevated temperatures. The second is contact reactors where lube distillate is mixed with clay and kept in suspension and then filtered to remove the clay. For the clay to effectively treat the oil, it needs to be activated by heating. The clays can be regenerated through a controlled combustion cycle and can be used multiple times before being disposed of. The clay treatment removes color, odor and some sulfur. The finished product meets API Group I base oil specifications but does not remove the unsaturated compounds to meet API Group II specifications. Clay treatment may be better suited for smaller plant capacities due to lower capital investment.
Solvent Extraction (not offered by CEP)

Solvent extraction is used to improve the quality of lube distillate that is produced from a vacuum distillation process. The solvent is used to extract polar compounds, additives and color bodies. It removes aromatics and increases saturates level. One drawback to solvent extraction is that it removes the unsaturated compounds, reducing the overall yield. This is in contrast to hydrotreating which converts these compounds. Solvent extraction produces API Group I base oil that meets motor oil specifications but does not meet API Group II specifications due to its inability to remove sulfur.


http://www.ceptechnology.com/alternative-process

 

[SonofJoe]

Nyogtha,

You seem to have had the career I always wanted but didn't!

My old refinery was a simple hydroskimmer originally built in 1960. They built a big expansion (effectively a new hydroskimmer) in the early 70s. It came on-stream just in time for the first oil crisis! As a result of the slump in demand, the older half of the refinery, whilst still perfectly serviceable, was instantly mothballed. Quite mad really!

Anyway, the original crude unit was quickly converted into a Visbreaker. I joined in '78 and the Visbreaker came on stream a year later. For a couple of years, thanks to the Ayatollah, the unit made crazy money as the light-heavy price differential was just ENORMOUS! I really loved that time as it was a very creative period. I'm 25 years old, just out of uni and seasoned Exxon engineers are asking Little Me if I could run the unit (which was exclusively designed as a residue cracker) as a VGO thermal cracker for a while? I have a play around with the numbers and figure why not! And we do and we keep cranking up the severity until the safety valves of the light-ends units are popping!

Sadly as demand continued to fall off a cliff, the need for my old refinery diminished and it became clear that the end was nigh. However, the company policy was to relocate the older, more experienced staff before the refinery shutdown in late '83. The head count dropped by about a third leaving 'schoolboys' like me to run the show (I was nominally in charge of planning). It was a crazy wild time but I think that period taught me the art of thinking logically while a million things are going on around you!

I had hoped to get transferred to our sister refinery but that sort of got scuppered very late in the day. I ended up transferring into chemical additives. Although I got a promotion and loads of expenses out of it, looking back, it was the wrong move. Like a lot of Exxon folks, I got a well paid expat assignment out of it but chemicals is SO SMALL are I never got the same buzz out if it. Also Chemicals people are an entirely different breed to refining folks; very 'salesy', lots of egos & people playing nasty politics.

I moved out of Fuels into Lubes in '97 after wallowing around for a long time. It was an interesting time. It struck me then (and still strikes me today) that no-one understands lube oil formulation in the way you might understand how to run a Visbreaker or an FCCU. There was no science or logic; just pure guessing! So I put my old refining hat back on and figured out how to blend finished PCMO from scratch.

And then fate struck again 2000 when the AddCo I was working for almost went bankrupt. Loads of staff were let go which was obviously sad for them, but for me it was PURE JOY! All of the overpaid deadbeats & fifth rate politicos that contributed nothing and just 'got in the way' were no longer there telling me what I couldn't do. So I did what I wanted to do! And it worked.

However that 'different breeds' thing was always a problem. There's a line from one of the Planet Of The Apes films which goes 'Human no like smart ape'. I might have been smart and I might of been successful but popular, especially with the 'right' people? Sadly that eluded me. So after one argument too many, I threw in the towel and walked away.

 

[Nyogtha]

JHRZ2, thanks for the additional info. Agreed that's got to be some expensive H2 in PR. If the rest of the refinery was running and if it had a SMR they coukd actually run it on propane or evrn naphtha in the absence of natural gas, so it's tough as a stand-alone re-refiner.

That last paragraph in what you posted is eye opening.

So we have 3 basic approaches with key pieces of technology.

First is acid clay treating, which produces the lowest quality re-refined product.

Second is propane solvent extraction without hydrotreating as practiced in Europe. Although 50% of used European oil is re-refined, this approach yields only Group I quality base oil. So the re-refined base oil isn't high enough quality to be re-used in the same application the source waste oil came from.

Third is hydrotreating with thin film evaporation. Although only 10% to 15% of NA used oil is re-refined, this approach produces the highest quality end product, Group II and even some Group III quality base oil.

SOJ my career was in one location but a plethora of roles, then a jump of ship when it was clear I was being early career plateued. The second refinery I worked at was "on the bubble" with a very technical focused refinery manager determined to turn things around. He appreciated my technical focus and aptitute and endowed me with a lot of trust and latitude, and we not only turned things around, that refinery now runs 25% more feedstock and is location advantaged for the Utica shale crude ptoduction. The third facility was a world class refinery known for its efficency that we expanded by building a parallel refinery; first one had a FCCU, second had a hydrocracker. Like you though I was never a politician or sycophant. I had great mutual respect & rapport with the shift worker operators having worked my way through school at the sharp end of the stick and not talking down to them. But I was no politician or sycophant among the "officer class" if you will and made some draconian decisions and actions to keep things safe and keep the gates open. I was well known for technical know-how & critical thinking and could challenge company technology experts. If you wanted the honest answer, ask me; if a political answer was desired I was the last person one should ask. I remember staring down a VP when only 3 years out of school who disagreed with my diagnosis of problems with our propylene splitter asking me "Do you like your job?" in an intimidating manner. I answered "I guess I'm like most people, some days better than others." then turned back to my work while he fumed in my office doorway. Shutdown of the equipment proved me right and I worked there 7 more years.

My health forced my retirement at 50. After multiple surgeries and some cutting edge treatments, I'm looking to re-enter the work force, but it's slow in my geographical area for my field currently.

 

[SonofJoe]

Nyogtha,

First off, Happy Christmas!

Sorry to hear about your health problems. If it's any consolation, I walked away from the world of work at the tender age of 53, when I was probably at the top of my game. Whilst I always enjoyed 'the work', as I got older I became more & more intolerant of an increasingly incompetent 'officer class' telling me what to do and forever wanting to play The Domination Game. You get to a point where you ask yourself questions like why am I working with people I don't like for money I don't need?

Anyways, eight years on, I can put my hand on heart and say leaving was one of my better life decisions. I sleep. I don't stress. I've cut down massively on the booze (the entire engine oil industry self-lubricates with copious amounts of alcohol!), I get to look after my grandson and I'm blissfully happy. In that eight years, I seen three former colleagues die prematurely in their 50's. Had I stayed, I might have been one of them.

If you're looking to re-enter the workplace, good luck. Here in the UK, the refining industry is a shadow of what it was when I left uni. The wholesale shift to relatively small, fuel efficient engines has cratered the basic demand for oil plus a lot of refined product now gets imported from Saudi & India.

It's just a thought, but have you ever thought about getting into lube oils? You're massively overqualified & you would find the entire industry quite ridiculous! However IMO the industry needs more chemical engineers with refining experience looking at the problems it faces. Automobile engineers & chemists just aren't skilled up enough to properly address fundamental problems like fuel dilution & oil consumption. You would have to start from nothing & the maths would be horrendous, but applying some multicomponent vapour-liquid equilibrium science to the internal combustion engine to model oil/blow-by interactions under various conditions has never been attempted before. If you could do that, it would be a major breakthrough. Just don't expect too much by way of credit (remember 'Human not like smart ape'!).

 

[Nyogtha]

Ha! If there was one lesson I got early from the 'officer class' it was:

If there is credit to be taken, you shall have none of it!
If there is blame to be placed, you shall have all of it!

I enjoyed my work but never drank the officer's kool-ade and it did get tiresome to be looked down on for having good rapport & mutual respect with the shift workers. When leading I always lead from the front and never asked anyone to do something I hadn't done or wasn't willing to do myself. I would willingly expose myself to the same risks. Plus, I hear what you're saying. You can run out of attempts to tactfully approach situations where it's "No boss, you're still wrong and here's why" especially if what is handed down us to just get in line and salute. I would always find a way to work Nuremburg into such exchanges . . . and that my role was to come up with alternatives.

The largest problem at this point is everyone wants someone at my age / years of experience to be a super specialist in something, while I'm a super generalist with some more in-depth extensive experience in some areas like FCCU. Just getting past the HR hurdle of "which hole does this peg fit in" to secure an interview is much larger than I ever imagined.

But life is good, my wife also a ChE became a modeling especially LP computer expert and is now part of the 'officer class' at at a corporate HQ with a staff of super specialist pet geeks. She enjoys her work and is both well liked and well respected. She now makes more coin than the two of us together made as refinery level engineers. It's funny her old department in the prior company switched where a PhD was required for even entry level positions for such work, so here she was with a simple 4 year degree supervising and training folks with advanced degrees when by HR standards she wasn't qualified to be hired into her department!

I wouldn't fit in in lubes, I have a university colleague who pursued that path successfully as a far more gregarious and malleable type of individual to start with, and I can't drink alcohol! For HQ positions something like Product Quality oversight assisting with incident investigations and coming ip with path forward plans would suit me well but if it doesn't happen before my wife is ready yo retire, no big deal. I do more community volunteer work and gave reconnected with some old friends, some of whose lives gave been less fortunate that I have free time to help out now.

A Merry Christmas to you & yours as well SOJ! Keep enjoying retirement as a lifestyle imptovement!

 

[Shannow]

LOL, some of that sounds like my engineering career. Any technical problem for anything I ever walked past in my career, I'm supposed to be Subject Matter Expert, even three-four iterations of incumbent later. Politics usually involved me being pawned around to fix the latest are that had decayed into disaster.

BTW, to add to the thread, the auxiliary firing fuel for the coal boilers is either diesel or heating oil...200,000 litres for a cold start, 150,000 litres for a hot start, and around 7,000 litres per day for load swings as we have to bring milling plant in and out of service (archaic NFPA codes).

We've been fiddling with viscosity, with the intent of using as little virgin, high value oil as we can...

Here's a "UOA/VOA" of a recent batch, tuned for 10Cst@40C, and no gelation issues at -5C.



Honestly, and I hope that I'm not being blinkered in my assessment, this is the best place for it to go. Ash ends up in the 2,000TPD that we create (500TPD ends up beneficially in concrete, and we are working on more)

SoJ, per your glycol comment, we had issues last year with 20um filter pluggages. The (re)-refinery, I think it was only columns (limit of my understanding) filtered it through 5um when it was loaded into trucks, and stray glycols agglomerated the particles in transport/our storage.

Re-re-refining for re-use, I've done a few thousand litres of hydraulic oil, a few tens of times that transformer oils and the like (fullers earth, vacuuum dehydration, and ultrafiltration, with additive tests and replenishment required...these were simple oils, even the turbine oils aren't cost effective to reclaim like that)

 

[Nyogtha]

I'd say so, your systems are more tolerant of PCMO additives it appears than marine engines, and if you were using a heavy fuel oil blended with a lot of vacuum tower bottoms you have to watch for vanadium effects and eutectics. We had to use lots of cutterstock to blend off the supercritical deasphalting unit pitch into heavy fuel oil. Also, burning VII is eadier than rejecting it during re-refining apparently.


I understand SOJ's position that re-refining should approach 100% even though I don't agree - what level of government subsidy would that require to override free market dynamics that much more strongly, and how many sweetheart brother-in-law deals would result from so much government involvement?

Yes I was definitely immersed in a culture of "you touched it so you're the SME in perpetuity" culture at my employers, even having to travel around 1300 miles one way on occasions like some dort of consultant and always just a phone call or email away until I jumped ships. I was even dragged 1300 miles or so each way to serve as a key witness in court proceedings for events that took place years after I departed one employer!

 

[Shannow]

Yes, pressure and air atomised burners into a slight negative pressure. No injector poppets to upset, and no cyclinders to scor and gum rings.

We can do 130MW (500MW thermal release in the boilers) on oil. But it's $270/MWh (27c/KWh) doing it.

Just like...that's a starting fire.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: SHOZ
Who knows, they may make asphalt from it?


Well sure as little green apples, used oil tipped on the ground in a pile of gravel is NOT asphalt...just saying.