Used oil being used as basestock

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Does anyone here know of any oil companies out there besides Safety Kleen that is using used oil, thats re refined and cleaned as a basestock?

I'm just wondering why so much used oil is wasted or disposed of the wrong way; but I'm probably wrong. I take all my used ATF, oils, etc to work and put in our waste oil tank
 
> I'm just wondering why so much used oil is wasted or disposed of the wrong way

Someone has to buy rerefined oil.
It's been a commercial flop.
 
Originally Posted by Rmay635703
It makes good diesel fuel, wonder why they don't just crack it?
It's cheaper to just burn it as bunker fuel in large ships, etc. I don't know what other products Safety-Kleen makes from their re-refining process, but I would guess there's some asphalt and other burnable products created.
 
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Used oil re-refining is the process of restoring used oil to new oil by removing chemical impurities, heavy metals and dirt. Used Industrial and automotive oil is recycled at re-refineries. The used oil is first tested to determine suitability for re-refining, after which it is dehydrated and the water distillate is treated before being released into the environment. Dehydrating also removes the residual light fuel that can be used to power the refinery, and additionally captures ethylene glycol for re-use in recycled antifreeze.

Next, industrial fuel is separated out of the used oil then vacuum distillation removes the lube cut (that is, the fraction suitable for reuse as lubricating oil) leaving a heavy oil that contains the used oil's additives and other by-products such as asphalt extender. The lube cut next undergoes hydro treating, or catalytic hydrogenation to remove residual polymers and other chemical compounds, and saturate carbon chains with hydrogen for greater stability.

Final oil separation, or fractionating, separates the oil into three different oil grades: Light viscosity lubricants suitable for general lubricant applications, low viscosity lubricants for automotive and industrial applications, and high viscosity lubricants for heavy-duty applications. The oil that is produced in this step is referred to as re-refined base oil (RRBL).

The final step is blending additives into these three grades of oil products to produce final products with the right detergent and anti-friction qualities. Then each product is tested again for quality and purity before being released for sale to the public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_oil_recycling
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The oil in a motor oil product does break down and burns as it is used in an engine — it also gets contaminated with particles and chemicals that make it a less effective lubricant. Re-refining cleans the contaminants and used additives out of the dirty oil. From there, this clean "base stock" is blended with some virgin base stock and a new additives package to make a finished lubricant product that can be just as effective as lubricants made with all-virgin oil. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines re-refined products as containing at least 25% re-refined base stock, but other standards are significantly higher. The California State public contract code defines a re-refined motor oil as one that contains at least 70% re-refined base stock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_oil#Re-refined_motor_oil
 
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Originally Posted by csandste
Didn't the Valvoline rerefined product cost more?
NextGen did cost a little more originally, but it flopped so hard that a lot of stores practically gave it away. I still have a pretty good amount of NG MaxLife in my stash from when O'Reilly and others threw in the towel on it, it seems just as good as standard ML in my experience.
 
Originally Posted by bullwinkle
Originally Posted by csandste
Didn't the Valvoline rerefined product cost more?
NextGen did cost a little more originally, but it flopped so hard that a lot of stores practically gave it away.


There's some on the clearance shelf at Pep Boys in Waco... It's way overpriced (even on clearance) and I swear it's been on that shelf for 10 years now.
 
I grew up hearing that Sears & Roebuck's oil was re-refined and that many preferred it as some lower level stuff(?) had been burned away and that the adpack was all new and up to proportion.
 
When you think about it, the quality of the re-refined basestocks must be getting better and better all the time...much higher percentage of synthetics in the waste stream.

But it's a feely good, cost more achieve less ambition to re-use the basestocks.


Cleaned up and sent to bunker fuel to offset high value diesel and heating oil is the most appropriate way of dealing with the waste.

We use it for boiler light off fuel, re-refined, and blended with diesel to get it down to 10Cst at 40C. Other glycol contaminants have caused us issues over time that would be painful if trying to use it for engine oil
 
Originally Posted by Rmay635703
It makes good diesel fuel, wonder why they don't just crack it?

The additives that transform a base stock to a fully formulated motor oil are permanent cracking catalyst poisons, and even hydrotreating catalyst poisons, so successful re-refiners include thin film evaporation in addition to vacuum distillation these days to reject the additives in a fraction routed to heavy fuel oil blending before hydrotreating the remainder. BP tried including used motor oil in coker feed for pure brute force thermal cracking and wound up with metallurgy issues causing premature equipment failure from these additives. The history of re-refining used lubricating oil is long and includes many less than successful approaches.

Originally Posted by Shannow

But it's a feely good, cost more achieve less ambition to re-use the basestocks.

Well put. It has never been sustainably economically competitive vs virgin basestocks of same quality in the consumer market.
 
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Originally Posted by ironman_gq
Here the shops just use it for heat, waste oil heaters save them a ton of money on fuel.

It is recycling.
 
Originally Posted by Nyogtha
Originally Posted by Shannow
But it's a feely good, cost more achieve less ambition to re-use the basestocks.

Well put. It has never been sustainably economically competitive vs virgin basestocks of same quality in the consumer market.

Consumers always turn their noses up at it, too. We've seen how the experiments have worked out. Canadian Supertech is Safety-Kleen, but there's precious little, if anything, on the label about its origin, so the average non-BITOG customer really doesn't know, and the BITOG customer won't mind. Economics aside, it seems to be one of those areas where everyone thinks it's a good idea, as long as they're not the one using the product.
 
A lot of them were sold to fleet (government) to score brownie points instead of to retail customers. I would not be surprised they sold the base oil to others and were blending in virgin base oil and never advertise it.
 
Some governmental agencies require use of re-refined engine oils in their fleets, which creates the demand volume in the US for this product and service.

I recall when America's Choice by Safety-Kleen was available in quart bottles on shelves at Walnart - at a price for conventional motor oil anove the price for brand name conventional motor oil and well above the WM brand price for conventional motor oil - maybe that was when the brand was Tech 2000 instead of Supertech, been a while.
 
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I worked at a test plant for converting used oil to asphalt, heavy cut, light cut and heater fuel.It was a lot of junk added to used oil before we got it. A lot of water and glycol, paints, anything people wanted to get rid of was dumped into the used oil.

First thing we had to do was to heat up the oil to drive out as much water as you can. This steam was injected to a scrubber stack to be treated. Then the dryer oil went into some heat exchangers where then it hit a vacuum tower. The bottom of the tower where the oil was injected in with heated asphalte about 800 degrees f , where it made more asphalt, then the next lighter cut was a heavy bunker type fuel , then the next cut was almost like a diesel fuel then the top went back as fuel for your heaters. A very corrosive, coking, process. We did 2000 barrels a day.

I saw the writing on the wall after 2 years there and decided to transfer out. It was a major oil company and they don't like to lose money. I thought they would have been more support from the refining group but we were a marine fuel division. They did sell out and from what I understand the independent is making money with it.
 
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