Recycling Drain Oil
It saves money, and the earth.
ED THOMAS
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
If you're a true believer in protecting the environment — and even if you're not — it'll sicken you to know that huge amounts of engine oil drained from crankcases is poured down sewers, buried in the ground and otherwise gotten rid of in ways that despoil the earth. The amount is staggering — about 350 million gallons a year, more than 35 times the crude oil spilled from the notorious Exxon Valdez supertanker wreck in Alaska, according to industry estimates.
But if you work in a fleet shop, or patronize a shop that does oil changes, you know that drain oil must be disposed of properly, according to strict federal, state and local laws. Oil filters, too, should not be trashed, but taken away in an approved manner. The person or company who owns the shop is the originator of this "waste stream," and ultimately responsible for it, even if he hires an outside service to do it.
Know the outfit you hire, know what it's doing with the drain oil and other waste from your shop, and make it provide the paperwork to prove it if an oil spill is traced back. Violators face huge fines and even jail time.
Aside from the legalities, drain oil can be recycled in several ways: Burning it in shop space heaters or in engines themselves, which in effect converts the old lube oil into a fuel. Or have the drain oil hauled out by a service that arranges to have the oil reused in some way.
The space heater "solution" may not be, because some local clean air authorities prohibit the practice. The fear is that the heaters may not burn the oil cleanly enough and that soot and heavy metals will pollute the air. But where it's allowed, this can save big money in shop heating, especially when the cost of fuel oil spikes, as it always does during bitter cold winters. A number of firms sell furnaces designed to burn used motor oil.
Burning motor oil in diesels is forbidden by some engine builders, but Cummins practically encourages it with its Centinel, an on-board system that extracts small amounts of oil from the crankcase and sends it to the fuel tank. There it's blended with the fuel and burned during normal combustion. Simultaneously, Centinel adds the same amount of new oil from a make-up tank into the engine. A "burn-only" version does the extraction and mixing, but does not have the make-up tank, so drivers or service people must replenish the crankcase oil.
Centinel allows an engine to go as far as 525,000 miles between oil changes and 100,000 miles before changing its filters. If you'd normally change oil at 15,000-mile intervals and now eliminate all of them, you avoid disposing of hundreds of gallons of oil. If it's 10 gallons per change, that's 350 gallons you don't have to worry about. It should also boost fuel economy a bit because you're substituting motor oil for a small percentage of diesel fuel. Centinel is approved by Cummins and the federal EPA for L10, M11, ISM and N14 diesels.
If you can't or won't burn the drain oil, then ask the service that hauls it away what it does with the stuff. If it's Safety-Kleen, which claims to be the largest oil disposal service in the world, your old oil may be re-refined. The company has two re-refineries to process used oil into clean, clear, reusable premium base oil.
It also also processes used oil filters, which it says can retain 44% of their oil residue after being drained and dumped. Crushing can still leave 12% of the oil inside. That's why many local laws prohibit dumping used filters in landfills. Safety-Kleen collects used filters in special containers and processes them to remove all oil. Aluminum from the filter canisters can then be recycled.
The company says its drain oil re-refinery in East Chicago, Ind., has processed more than 1 billion gallons of oil since opening in 1991. As many as 35% of customers select a "closed loop" option in which they supply drain oil and use re-refined oil products under Safety-Kleen's America's Choice label.
76 Lubricants Co. is another re-refiner, producing Firebird brand motor oils in a process similar to the one that takes virgin crude oil and transforms it to base lubricating stock. First, the used motor oil is chemically pre-treated. Water boils off as steam. The resulting dehydrated oil is vacuum distilled, creating asphalt flux (used for roofing materials), fuel oil (used as refinery fuel), and separate lube oil distillates.
But while it takes an entire barrel of crude to make one gallon of lube oil, only two gallons of drain oil are needed to produce a gallon of motor oil. The energy savings are tremendous, the company says. Though many consumers are leery of re-refined oils, 76 Firebird motor oils meet the same performance standards as products refined from fresh crude oil.
The company names major government and private fleets as users, and says auto builders fill crankcases of new-car engines with re-refined lube oils. Prices for re-refined oils vary in the marketplace, but often sell for less than new-stock oils, 76 Lubricants says. That should get the attention of even non-environment freaks.
