Originally Posted By: HerrStig
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
No problem with its quality, but I'm thinking whether the whole process of using it in lubrication again is more efficient than feeding it into large ships and burn it directly before the delicate re-refining process.
Say your refinery is along the coast, you can feed the waste engine oil into a ship and burn it without the re-refining process, but you re-refine the waste oil and make new engine oil out of it. The ship still needs to burn fuel so it takes up new fuel from oil instead. This isn't saving the environment much.
Say your refinery is in the middle of the nation (Kentucky for example), and you send your waste oil from California to Kentucky for refining and then send the base stock or finished oil from the refinery in Kentucky back to California. This is totally not efficient compare to burning it directly in a ship from California back to China.
Now if your waste oil is in Kentucky, and you refine it into base stock and then blend into lubricant used in Kentucky, it would be much more efficient than sending it to California to burn in a ship.
If all the waste oil are used efficiently without re-refining them back into lubricant base stock, IMO it is not really that much of an improvement over what is already done (burning it as a fuel to reduce crude oil derived fuel).
You are "complicating" the issue with a good discussion of the economics involved. Throw enough government money at it and economics will no longer matter.
Economics will always matter in spite of the gummints "best" intentions.
MIke